When you thought you oversimplified the user interface but it's still too confusing for the user...

My boss pissed me off so much yesterday I totally ditched work today. I had some spiced rum for breakfast (and dinner) and spent the day playing minecraft and browsing Black Friday specials.

I did a little bit of work that (oversimplified) involved paying a Clover contractor for doing basically nothing. Totes cool with that as the guy is really nice and a decent dev. Annoyingly, though, he started hitting on me and asked me out on a date at the end of the call. He's like 65 and has a daughter (grand daughter?) my age, so that's like totally creepy. Ugh.

Getting hit on by random old men is still better than talking to Mr. Asshole the Sales Fetishizer, though.

One day at a doctor who started a small conversation:
Doc: What is your job?
Me: I am a software developer, I write computer programs basically.
Doc: Interesting. How does it work?
Me: Oversimplified you have special languages to tell the computer what to do and then this is converted into a program you can start on your PC. The languages are a bit like basic english (thought of Pascal at this moment).
Doc: So then it is a pretty simple job.

Me thinking: OMFG yes that's why I studied it 6 years, because it's soo easy.

Me thinking at home: Next time tell them that you are a computer scientist and that it is applied mathematics basically. Maybe then they will get a clue of the complexity. 🤔

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

Software engineering is becoming main stream.

It will become the average job in the future. Anyone who cant dev is going to be poor and do the dirtiest jobs.

Dev average income is going to drop， mainly because a shit loads of frameworks and dumbification of software and code creation will be set in place to accomodate large population as devs.

The will create a seperation between the normal idiot dev who will be paid minimum wage and the smart ones that create the frameworks and dumbed down code creating tools.

Its oversimplified obviously because im not taking into account sys admin and so on but in general it will follow that trend. Its like this today but because there isnt enough devs， idiots are still revered and payed big bucks.

Give it 50 to 75 years imo.

Just because it's popular, doesn't mean it's good.

An overengineered solution can usually be simplified without breaking anything important. An oversimplified solution can rarely be upgraded without major breaking changes.

Not everything needs to follow the "best practices" - if it's not a part of the core functionality, diminishing returns often kick in quite fast.

Ugh, I hate having to port data from windows to Mac. I myself use Linux and windows. My mom got her first Mac for her birthday, but she needed her 200gb of pictures on I cloud. So I thought it would be like Dropbox, put them in a folder or start an upload and then it processes and is on the cloud. NO. It’s a hellscape as Apples windows programs are awful and I’m ashamed they exist. There is no indication of when they have successfully uploaded, you just have to figure it out. It also doesn’t help when macOS Is oversimplified. Ugh. I ended up taking my terabyte external and having to wait 3 hours for files to transfer and put those on the MacBook. I hate I cloud more than comic sans. I know Dropbox isn’t great or even good for security reasons, but it’s a hell of a lot better than I cloud BULLSHIT.

Egad! An actual rant is revealed!

Lamers who insist that informal or oversimplified stuff be written are damn annoying.

God forbid the appropriate use of a four-syllable word.
In what world is "uncanny" a strange word?

Is "blessed are the authors of good documentation" such a difficult sentence? Call the linguist; this shit can only be interpreted by an expert!

"U WRITE LIEK A ROBOT!!!!!!!!!"
Piss off, trog. Some men like succinctness and just wish to communicate without a great deal of ambiguity. A bit of clunkiness is preferable to a bit of ambiguity.

Pants are apparently shat when proper sentences are encountered.

If writing coherently and correctly implies being pretentious, then the world is beyond repair.

Also annoying are lamers who insist on wasting other men's time by asking questions which are perfectly suited for search engines.

Reaching through the monitor and beating the crap out of people sometimes seems a bit tempting. But doing such a thing is infeasible... and would probably result in felony charges if such a thing were feasible.

So are we living in the time where new programmer are no longer care know how to code effective and clean code because of libraries out there OVERSIMPLIFIED it?

Sitting in a bar with a senior colleague (Me - Student part timer, Him - 15+ Years of experience).
We started talking about our projects and he mentioned that after this, he'd get to spend his evening fixing a git merge, which went wrong because one of his teammates used cherry pick and thus messed up the history a bit (oversimplified).
So he tells me he'd be spending hours to get an overview of his colleagues codes (multiple devs and only team leader knows who does what exactly).
So I suggested he revert these cherry picked commits and so could maybe solve the problem in less time.
He thought about it... Told me HE didn't think of that and thanked me for my help.

Long story short: Today was a good day :3

Don't call yourself a 'dev.' Its oversimplified and doesn't really mean anything. Figure out what you actually do and call yourself whatever that is.

What's the point of the Gmail API if you can do all of its functions with IMAP or POP3 and not have to have user login oauth, just account and password?

I wanted to read a company email account for certain emails related to our tickets. No one actually accesses this account, and the tool is without a GUI. As such, I can't use the Gmail API. I just remembered there must be a more ordinary way to do this because how does Outlook and other email software work? So python import imaplib and I was done in a few minutes.

I am not a very experienced developer, so naturally I don't know many fundamental things. My thinking around a lot of the necessary things is that the answer should come to me according to the need. So an oversimplified example could be, say I'm solving a Dynamic programming problem, I should not need to know the algorithm beforehand I can maybe invent it. This thinking stops me learning a lot things because I feel like then when I learn a pattern I will restrict my thought process within the knowledge I have and not think beyond it. I feel like that I am doing the dumb mistake of learning things bt heart and not understanding.
Does anyone felt the same? What your experience says about this?