Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build
Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!
Title: Dev Manager
Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.
Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request
Title: Product / Product Manager
Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop
Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them
Title: Program Lead / Product Owner
Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)
Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists
Title: Director of Software Engineering
Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)
Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen9 -
Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.
I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..
First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.
Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!
A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"
I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.
At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.
One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!
Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.
With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.
Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.
I dont know what to do...
Edit: I missed you, devrant6 -
Subject: FW: Twilio integration
Date: 20th June
From: <program-lead>
PractiseSafeHex I need you to fill in the dev completion dates for the Twilio task for the mobile team by EOD today. Backend have already supplied theres. Otherwise I will be forced to mark the task as “At Risk”. Please let me know if there is an issue or you are blocked.
—- Begin Forwarded Mail ——
Subject: Twilio integration
Date: 18th June
From: <program-lead>
Hi All,
Documenting today’s meeting minutes. Backend confirmed they will handle the Twilio integration from their side entirely. There will be no mobile work required for this task.
Thank you,
<program-lead>11 -
My first dev job. Me and another guy get hired at the same time. He will be the lead dev, and I’ll be the junior dev on a long term project. Project gets delayed (and eventually canceled, but that’s a different story), so the lead dev decides to give me programming challenges to test my skill level. I successfully complete the challenges, but they aren’t up to his standards. Belittles me in front of our manager. Afterwards I ask him to show me how he would have done it. The dude can barely type let alone show me the way it should be done. I say nothing to the manager.
A few weeks pass, it’s clear the project we were hired for is canceled, so we are given other work. They task the lead dev with porting the company website to Wordpress so non-devs can alter content. They chose Wordpress mainly because the lead dev said he is familiar with it. Two weeks later, no progress has been made. They ask me if I can do it, and I do it in 2 days including additional functionality that was requested. Manager asks me why I thought lead dev couldn’t do what I did. I said, “I don’t think lead dev knows what the fuck he is doing. I don’t think he knows how to program.” Manager says, “Huh.”
Several months later lead dev is still there, but has yet to work on any projects with any success. They finally let him go.
Glad to finally get that off my chest.6 -
Senior Devs made the Program Manager cry. Dev Lead did nothing to stop it from happening, Program Manager Lead was in shock.16
-
A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.
A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.
So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉2 -
I am a student. A Geospatial Engineering student. I made a demo Cordova app mapping incident spots on OSM., now my fellow undergrads think I can hack NSA, program a satellite, build all their dream websites and apps. The College Department wants me to lead an in-house photogrammetric programmable drone project. If they ask I'll say yes... yes I can! shit.😂5
-
I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.
I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.
At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.
On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.
The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.
In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.
That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.
Win.13 -
Best of NPC recruiter, 4/11:
Recruiter: I was impressed with your background and industry experience and thought you would be a perfect fit for our series A startup *10 minute drone of how awesome they are*
Me: *eyeglazing over* What role is this?
Recruiter: What roles are you looking for? Where do you see yourself in 3 years? We're looking for a program manager or dev lead to manage a team"
Me: I'm looking for an SDET role.
Recruiter: ......*silence* so you want to run scripts, hmm.... Well, looks we don't have an exact fit at the time, but let's keep in touch for future opportunities! You never know when you'll -
Me: ... Why did you even contact me? What about my profile struck you as being aligned to anything you were looking for?
Recruiter: Well, you have a master's in CS and worked at [BigN#1] and [BigN#2] and -
Me: Thank you for your time, been a pleasure *hang up*
I want my 15 minutes back.5 -
At work:
** fast typing from lead and me fx**
** lead stops typing, scratch record sound and headhphones being taken off fx**
Lead Devel: Yo Al
*still typing fx**
Me: whats good gansgtah
L.D: remember how we talked about bringing in a version manager into that <huge_pilo_shit> program? But we haven't done it cuz we some lazy mofockas?
** now I stop typing **
Me: .....yes......fuck
Him: yes...fuck
O_o fuck....that bitch is huge man.......2 -
Part 3: today has become a blog post.
WARNING: this is loooooooooooong
Background is my boss and I were talking about hiring the right people, also generalists vs specialists.
Essentially John and I are the specialists. When something goes wrong it ends up escalating to either him or me. But this is not sustainable as I can't handle the stress and most likely he eventually won't either.
And this goes back to general hiring standards.
All the good people leave and the remaining ones are stuck with all the problems and eventually for one reason or another they leave as well... or the code keeps getting worse... until someone decides to scrap everything and build a new one... But now the only people left to lead teams are monkeys.
Now current problem is the only person that can replace me is John and the only person that can replace John, at least in handling issues, is me...
It's a certain type of person, people that have a growth mindset and can pick things up.
Google and strong tech companies are full of these types of people where if needed there's always someone that can step in and help. They have the background and the ability to quickly learn. This also lets them innovate and identify and solve new problems.
I think that's what the technical interviews are for, to find these types of people.
And you really can't train this. I'm not sure how effective our "new" training program on high quality development is but I'm guessing it's not. Excellence has to be in the culture and it's not something that can be built overnight or by randomly hiring people.
So in a sense, tech companies aren't really paying well, they're paying cost to what their hires are really worth, after they've verified it, and enough to keep them from leaving.3 -
I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.
Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.
So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.
How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.
Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.5 -
I got accepted for a Master's Degree Program in Software Engineering!
I'm super excited about this.
Course start next week! I'm freaking out a little, but I know this will lead to more exciting things in my life.11 -
tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.
Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';
First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.
After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.
We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.
In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.
The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.
We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.
We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.
After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.
A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.
We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:
"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."
That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.
Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.1 -
Waterfall Project Stages:
Requirements, Analysis, Design, Coding, Testing, Operations
When you promote project managers to program managers and tell them to switch to Agile, you get the Agilefall project stages:
Best guess, Timeline, User stories, Execution, Blame the devs when the project plan trends late.
I want to beat them with a copy of the PMBOK wrapped in lead.3 -
Issue or Error? Rant story time!
I was working on a windows desktop app, and everything was ok, you know, tests completed succesfully, all in time, etc. The problem was when we showed the demo to one of our clients. He saw several screens and we explained all the features to him.
Client: *Sees a Error pop-up indicating that a remote service is temporarly unavailable (what it has to happen in order to show him how the system would warn him when an external service is out of service)
Client: What’s that?
Lead dev: What do you mean?
Client: Yes. That’s an error pop-up
Lead dev: Yes, it’s a message that tells you that there was an issue connecting to the bank service
C: No, no and no. Please change it
L: Why? Don’t you want the system to tell you when there is a connection issue and why is that happening?
C: Yes, but my employees could lost their minds because of this class of messages!
L: So...?
C: You have to change it
L: Ok. What do you want to change?
C: First of all, don’t put an “Error” icon, put an “Warning” icon, and instead of “Error” title, put... “Issue”
L: “Issue?”
C: Yeah. Don’t put the “E” word, if the users see an “Error” message, they could think that the program doesn’t work, even if it does work.
We all though “WTF?!”
To make the story shorter, we changed all the pop-ups. That took two days.
Is that correct? I know that “Error” sounds hard but, seriously? “Issue: The remote service is not available, contact your bank?”6 -
There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):
John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.
Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.
Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.
Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.
Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.
Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.
Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.
Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!9 -
1. When i was 11 years old i came across a trojan horse program and i sent it to all my school friends to get their messenger password.
(I had a list of passwords of all the people in my class... dont worry, i didnt even used the passwords, i just stored them in my list lol)
2. Took data structures 10 years later, hated it and switched to electrical eng
3. I was working on a manufacturing plant as the lead engineer and one of my prototypes was misbehaving and i was blaming software and software was blaming me...typical stuff... So i said "im going to get a masters is software so i can know wtf you are talking about, and tell you that you are wrong😠!!"
Got in school, started in the masters and quit that place i was working for 🤣.. (they were shitty people and unethical business... fyi)
Now im back to where i was was when i was 11... (minus the hacking email accounts of my classmates)4 -
I started off in a MNC company as a junior developer. I entered with candy glasses.
I didn't expect to win the lottery. Of getting abuse by superior.
I stayed for a year, at the project. Constantly being belittled by this team lead. It was awful i enter as a fresh grad. All the new tech were so new and scary at that point.
During my time there, i constantly think that developer is not my stuff.
Ultimately i reach the state of burnout. I reached out to the manager and broke down in his office.
I actually told the manager. "I hate coding"
I remember staying up to 4am just complete a piece of program. To be ready to be push to production the next day. My team lead just come screaming at me saying there is bug.
Upon receiving that message via skype. I broke, tears flow down my eyes.
After which i reach a state of burn out. I start to reach out to external parties for help to get me out of there.
Now i am recovered from the burn out. I am curious of the technology that were utilized in that project. I literally face palm. After understanding the technology it isn't so hard after all. I just didn't gear myself up with the tech.
I still do enjoy working on code.3 -
Well! Hello everyone!
I am PokerJack. (Not a jAsE account)
Well, that's the name of my first Python Program. ~\_(-_-)_/~
Not a dev, would like to be one.
I work at Pornhub as a Consultant.
@rutee07 is my subordinate.
@devTea is my assistant
@Root - Dev Lead
@grumpyoldaf - Boss
@irene - Girlfriend
@jAsE - Heard about him, never found out who.
Btw, @rutee07 send me the test logins for all Pornhub Premium accounts. Immediately!!20 -
This is so annoying, I had 9 diff. jobs the past 2 years and this is my 10th and if this doesn't change I might reconsider my options again.
I came to work at a company that pays me like a Junior and treats me as an intern. My 20yo "boss" who acts as a project owner/lead dev doesn't want to learn anything new and sees any improvement as a waste of money. The problem is he thinks hes a great programmer but he doesn't know shit. Im mainly working on the Laravel installation because "I claimed I know Laravel". And its absolute garbage. They haven't used a single Laravel features besides routes and everything else is vanilla PHP. They write for loops that loop through $_REQUEST to remove a single character. Write 100 deep nested ifs and they abuse Elasticsearch to the point ES crashes because the program is using 1000 deep multidimensional arrays. Its only a webshop...
Everytime I try to make a suggestion like making the master branch protected, doing code reviews etc etc I get shut down because they are autistic and don't want anything to change.9 -
So we’ve taken over from a project team that disbanded... read: “cut their contracts because fuck this, I can earn more working for better people”.
Me and one other guy have been tasked with saving this heap of shit.
Obviously the project guys left saying “it’s nearly done, just this one feature”. Because cut contracts are easier to deal with if “everything is almost done”.
We jump on and find that’s not the case at all... this thing, is a beast, a big old stats analysis program... so we’re like “cool, let’s see what’s going o...OH MY GOD”.
The “recalculation” function was core to this POS. The contractors had done it in C# through entity framework... it took 24 hours to run, over a reasonably small data set that was due to double every 2-5 years.
So... here’s the deal, it ran over night.... then failed. And no cunt had noticed. Entity framework “can’t commit because I’m muddled up as fuck, did you really just put the whole db in EF in memory to work with it?” Exception.
Que 6 months of me and my lead doing the job properly.
Anyway, the failure: I ended up in Hospital again with a Crohn’s flare up... about 5 months in.
Fuckall to do with all this nonsense I just wanted to tell a story. it was an interesting/fun project to fix and my lead was a legend... so happy days.
Similar story, different set of contracted devs... they’d been defining requirements with the business users using the term “Risk” which the business users knew as a group of risks.
The domain model had been written RiskGroup<>— -
Feeling like a boss! 😎
Long story short:
Solved a formating issue in a program at work by using ancii code 32.
Even my team lead didn't think of that solution!4 -
This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
There are a couple:
A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)
A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!
A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss
Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P -
Me and the lead developer of my team gave a long and detailed explanation to our manager entailing the current state of a budge program our workplace uses.
This app has been bugging him for a while, he did not write it and has not been given an opportunity to rewrite the damned thing. Its a really...really messy application, and whilst it is a functional one it most certainly is NOT an efficient one since adding or moving things only incites more spaghetti mess.
We were laughing while giving our report, but both of us were crying inside. The main thing is, we both love PHP and the things he has built are very well structured and efficient, he has good technique, but will admit at certain caveats regarding the way he structures his dbs stating that he always has to do changes, which hey, its the nature of the beast, dbs change all the time. But our issue with php is the same: it lets beginners write monstruosities that are harder to do in other environments.
It really is a permissive language. But I reckon thay such lax nature is better left at the hands of the more experieced developers that know what they are doing.
Either way, we will restructure this motherfucker taking advantage of the new standards (which both of us are well versed in) and applying a more structured approach with a nice frontend interface (we be looking at Vue.js and React although we are considering Angular as well)
Gon be some good times. -
I'm way past the point of being pissed now....
So there's some software (API's, mobile app + website) that I wrote to manage supplier incentive programs in a big hurry last year - which lead to a bunch of stuff being hard-coded in to launch on time. So after last years promotion was done I took down all the services etc was very fucking clear that in order to finish & deploy it to run again I would need at least around 4 months notice.
On the surface its pretty simple but it has quite a large user base and controls the distribution of enough cash & prizes to buy a small country so the setup of the incentives/access/audit trails is not something to be taken lightly.
Then once I'm done with the setup I have to hand it over to be "independently audited" by 3 of the larger corporate behemoths who's cash it distributes (if I get a reply from one in 3-4 weeks it's pretty fast).
I only happened to find out by chance an hour ago that we are apparently launching an even larger program this year - ON FUCKING MONDAY. I literally happened to over hear this on my way for a smoke - they have been planning it since last year November and not one person thought it might be kinda important to let me know because software is "magic" and appears and works based on the fucking lunar cycle. -
When I was learning to program nearly 15 my years ago I was incorrectly lead to believe that dividing by zero would be a much more common problem.10
-
If you move the mouse-cursor to the top-right-most corner on Windows 10, a Win32 program and a UWP app when maximised, highlight and respond to the red-close button
An application made with Windows App SDK, does not. //tested with SDKv1.4, not overriding windows-made title bar
Probably coz of their window-margins with Msft's new found love of rounded corners.
Never thought Windows would be this blatantly horrible. Everything past 2020s Windows 10 has gone downhill. I wonder which top-guy left that lead to this downfall.8 -
Company logic: "we need a new software manager for the program. This guy has worked on every piece of our product. Including as team lead of one of the teams. But wait he has never signed time cards. We better bring in this guy who has been in the company less than a year and is a known job shopper to do it instead."
Long story short, I am getting a new software manager that knows nothing about our product. Fun4 -
Ok... so I have a unique question/opportunity. I can't give all the details but here's the jist:
3yrs ago I was hired to consult a now prominent(still decently well known then) web-based company with many thousands of users, dealing with a lot of money and leveraging a social environment. They had several issues but initially they really needed me to find/train chat mods.
I did not take the offer for monetary reasons, like all consulting I've done, I had additional reason and/or fondness to fix the issues. In this case it was an interesting challenge and I knew several customers and some support staff so it'd be worthwhile.
They (without request) reduced their typical 2mo probationary period to 2wk for me. With less than a day left of that period, I was 'hacked' via a pushed telegram update, on the account they made me create for work purposes (they had control of the phone number not me).
During this 'hack' one of the 2, currently active, culprits sent a message to his tg account from the 'hacked' one and quickly deleted the entire convo. The other pretended (poorly) to be me in the chat with the mods in training (at least a few directly witnessed this and provided commentary).
Suddenly, I was fired without any rationale or even a direct, non-culprit, saying anything to me.
The 'hack' also included some very legit, and very ignorantly used, Ukrainian malware.
This 'hack' was only to a 2nd gen lenovo yoga I got due to being a certified refurbisher... just used for small bs like this chat mod/etc job. I even opened up my network, made honey pots, etc., waiting for something more interesting... nope not even an attempt at the static ip.
I started a screen recording program shortly after this crap started (unfortunately after the message sent be 'me' to the dude who actually sent it happened... so i still dont know the contents).
I figured I'd wait it out until i was bored enough or the lead culprit was at a pinnacle to fall from...
The evidence is overwhelming. This moron had no clue what he was doing (rich af by birth type)... as this malware literally created an unhidden log file, including his info down to the MAC id of his MacBook... on my desktop in real time (no, not joking... that stupid)
Here's my quandary... Due to the somewhat adjacent nature of part of our soon to be public start-up... as i dont want it to turn into some coat tail for our tech to ride on for popularity... it's now or never.
Currently im thinking, aside from any revenge-esq scheme, it'd be somewhat socially irresponsible to not out him to his fellow investors and/or the organisation that is growing with him as one of few at the forefront... ironically all about trust/safety/verification of admins in the industry.
I tried to reach out to him and request a call... he's still just as immature. Spent hours essentially spamming me while claiming it wasnt him but hed help me find whoever it was... and several other failed attempts to know what i had. When i confirmed he wasnt going to attempt a call, i informed him id likey mute him because i don't have time for back and forth bs. True to form he deleted the chat (i recorded it but its of no value).
So... any thoughts?7 -
Lead dev runs the program I gave him to set up a bunch of processes that run for one database.
It has a GUI that seems native to his windows environment......but it sort of is not.
The program runs, asks for the .csv file that is to be parsed into the database.
Lead dev: Ok, what is this though?
Me (his boss) "Don't worry about it"
Him: "Holy shit what the fuck is this??? TELL ME!!!"
Me: DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT
Him: "WTF DID YOU MAKE THIS IN???!
ME: DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT
CMS Admin (another one of my employees) "Would you TWO SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!?"
New Guy (mainly a frontend dev): ........
Meanwhile, in production, no one knows if your gui app is built in Lazarus and Free Pascal, as long as it works.
I really need to stop doing this to the lead dev, dude already keeps trying to choke me for writing things in perl.
On another note, Object Pascal is pretty cool. Might write a book on it for those that want to do CLI based applications on it, I have no clue why every book on the subject costs in euros, but there should be more shit written for beginners, language is awesome and one can get lots of mileage from Lazarus and FPC11 -
Project Lead(PL): Can you copy your program in LX. I want to check if tables have data or not?
PL: Hi
Me: Hi PL, let me try
PL: Thanks
Me: Program is now in LX
PL: okay let me check
Me: also added the change...< for that bug you found on the not-paid self-initiated program I built>
PL: ok
PL: did you do it in LE or 1E?
PL: I just changed the < system connection settings of> LE to LX
PL: NOPE
PL: it does not show in LE
PL: SYS ID SHOULD BE LE
<at this point I just couldn't understand the need for all caps>
Me: <sends screenshot of program in LX>
PL: <differentiates LX and LE box>
Me: <sends screenshot showing I was asked to put program in LX>
PL: Oh my apologies
PL: I wanted it in LE
PL: so sorry @iamai
Me: yup all caps doesn't help :)
Me: let me put in LE
Sometimes it's better to tame the anger and read first. -
I spent a lot of my time as a little kid playing video games and typing on my old computer. Somehow I found GameMaker (6 or 7, I think) and started pumping out little games with the free version. I didn't like the drag and drop stuff so I learned GML (GameMaker Language).
A few years later someone gave me a PHP book and while I never actually learned anything from it, it did get me interested in learning a real programming language (not GML).
Around this time Minecraft became popular, and with a lot of YouTube videos I got a grasp on Java, and a little C++/C#.
Tinkering around in scripting languages finally lead me to JavaScript which of course introduced me to HTML and CSS.
I loved how quickly a website could me created compared to a compiled program, so I started spending most of my time learning Web Technologies.
And that leads me to where I am today. By this point I've spent over half of my life programing in various languages and formats and I've loved every bit of it! -
Question: is it common for lead software engineers to mostly do paperwork or is that just a quick of my current program?
Where I work it is very common for those titled "software leads" to be almost completely hands off the software. They deal in hiring, fielding user comments and commitments, and scheduling. I would like to be a lead but I was always under the assumption that dev leads had more of a design and/or architect role. Sort of a big picture thing rather than middle management which is what this feels like. -
Some compilers give an error message on forgotten type casting. From that it shows good typing style casting. So you also avoid clerical errors that can lead to the program crash in the worst case. With some types it is also necessary to perform type casting comma on others Types, however, do this automatically for the compiler.
In short:Type casting is used to prevent mistakes.
An example of such an error would be:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main ()
{
int * ptr = malloc (10*sizeof (int))+1;
free(ptr-1);
return 0;
}
By default, one tries to access the second element of the requested memory. However, this is not possible, since pointer calculation (+,-) does not work for a void pointer.
The improved example would be:
int * ptr = ((int *) malloc (10*sizeof (int)))+1;
Here, typecasting is done beforehand and this turns the void pointer into its int pointer and pointer calculation can be applied. Note: If instead of error "no output" is displayed on the sololearn C compiler try another compiler.
1 -
My dev goal for the new year will be teaching others, and I could use some help!
For quite some time I have been thinking about setting up some kind of community project in my area teaching people who are having a hard time finding a job in their field how to program, specifically web development, in order to advance their job prospects. There is a lot of demand here in Holland and as we all know it doesn't take much more than dedication, disambiguation skills and an almost fanatical fondness for solving puzzles to lead a very happy life as a developer. I'm hoping 2019 will be the year.
What complete courses can you recommend to teach someone how to code, that are fun/inspiring enough to keep someone motivated (and able to go to school and/or make a living in the meantime) until they can use their built up skills and portfolio to get a first job (perhaps 1-2 years)?
I plan on tutoring once or twice a week for a few hours and being available for chat the rest of the week when not working. I have enough experience (and curiosity) to help with any assignment but I do not have that much spare time, which is why I need this resource to be as good as possible, and to need as little extra explanation as possible.
My benchmark is the excellent freecodecamp, but I'm wondering if anything else is available. Bonus points for anything in Dutch, or anything that stands out by explaining things in the clearest way possible, and with great assignments of course.
Also I'd be very interested in any stories about similar (not-for-profit) initiatives, especially from a learner's point of view.
Thanks!1 -
I was ten years old. At this point, despite being in my early 20's, I've officially been programming more than half of my life. From the first moment I knew that this was possible, that we, as software engineers, can do what we do... I've been quite literally obsessed with the idea.
I don't like to give other people credit for the events in my own life, but there is one thing that, more than anything else at the time that lead me down the path of computer science, directly lead me to where I'm at today. If you're at all interested in film and cinema (not to mention programming) then you've undoubtedly heard of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. Amazing film, I'd recommend it to anyone based off of the film alone, but for me that movie holds a special place in my heart.
My mom took me to see it that movie in theaters when it came out, I would not stop bugging her to take me, there was just something about the founding of Facebook that... Sparked my young imagination. I swear to you that I didn't blink for the entire time I was in the theater watching it. It blew my mind, not only that you could do that kind of stuff with computers, but that you could actually make a lot of money working with computers as well... Ten year old me had different priorities in regards to programming 😂 Starting the moment I got home from the theater, I dedicated my life to learning everything I could about computers. Originally my goal was to, shock of all shocks, create a social networking site for me and my friends to use. I still like to brag about it to this day, but that project eventually became my groups final project in our computer class in Middle School. It was funny, middle school computer class, I had already been programming a few years by that point and was rather proficient in PHP. There were kids submitting literal spreadsheets in Excel as their final project, a few static HTML pages, that sorta jazz. My group and I submitted a full fledged twitter clone, with complete functionality. We got 100% on the project 😂😂
My reasons and interests have changed over the years. For example, I'm not particularly interested in creating a social media application these days, and I don't program because I think it'll make me rich one day (though the hopes always there) but the one thing that hasn't changed since that night I sat enraptured in the beautiful cinematography of David Fincher and facepaced dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, is the complete and total fascination with computers and technology. For that reason The Social Network will forever be my favorite movie.3 -
!Rant
TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.
MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....
A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);
Dear Systems Analyst,
I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.
In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.
Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.
Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.
I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?
.... The Systems Analyst replied:
Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.
Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.
Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.
Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).
Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.
When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.
It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.
Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.
To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).
DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.
BEST WISHES!
Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.1 -
One of my Computer Science modules this year revolved around completing a team project, and one person in the team basically fucked it up for all of us in the last minute.
We had to create a simple task management app for a fictional company, the university did not care about how the program looked and all that mattered was if the app is functional or not. The app relied heavily on a database, so all we basically had to do was get, modify, and add data from a database. Now this person did his part of the programming, but with an outdated database model and did not even test his code as he said MySQL wasn't working on his home computer.
2 days before the final deadline is when we decided to merge everything together in the git repo (as that's when the rest of us finished our tasks), and that's when we found out none of his code worked. We then spent the next 48 hours with little sleep to try our best to fix everything, but unfortunately due to his tasks carrying a majority of the complexity of the program we couldn't fix it all in time and we ended up losing roughly 50% of the marks.
This all probably could have been avoided if one person in the team did look at his git branch properly, but this person was the programming lead of the project and didn't ask for any help at any point until the last moment when we merged everything together. Oh well though, at least I've learnt better for the next team project that I do2 -
I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.
Okay, great, so what?
The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.
I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.3
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View