!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"

Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)

In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic

Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them

In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure

Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?

Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...

Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea

Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'

I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:

Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine

Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know

And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews

This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

I FINALLY DID IT!! I landed a job!! I'm going to be a firmware engineer!! Woohoo!! 😁
It only took half a year, but I finally got one, and purely off my own merit. It feels damn good when you get the job with no references or connections, just your own skills.
After a highly successful on-site technical/whiteboard interview, I was 90% confident I'd get it. The fact that my job search is finally over, is such a fucking relief. Good riddance to endless interview prep, applications & rejections.
I start on Monday. Goodbye freedom >.<

A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Engineer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Engineer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the Engineer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The Engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the Engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the Engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

How many references does it take to crash Java?

Null

Me: Finally, thanksgiving break. I can't wait to go 127.0.0.1 and read books all week.

Friend: Wait, so you found a phone number in a book? Dude, let's call it!

Me: ...

I'd love to have a friend at school who would understand my references but that's pretty much imposible.

When you have two screens and you need to read both for cross references.

Stack Overflow

A valid question making a fair point.
A valid answer with references and examples.

Both downvoted

tl;dr I need ideas on how to warn the next dev(s) that the company is a dumpster fire.

------

For the past week (actual time: three days) I've been writing documentation for work, since there isn't any. It's been okay, I guess. Certainly more interesting than anything else I've done at work in months.

I'm up to 10k words / 67kb of markdown, and I think I'm done. I could easily write another 30k words on everything, but I just can't care enough.

However, what I do care about is warning the next dev(s) about how terrible the place is to work, so I want to add little references or hints or other such things to my writing. To complicate that, there's a contractor dev who said he will edit the document to strip out my commentary and make it "friendly" for the next person. (I can kind of see why: I've been quite honest about the situation of everything, and it's pretty dire. If they read it as-is, they might just walk out the door. I certainly would have.) I'm also going to commit it to the repo, and afaik he doesn't have push rights, so he can't force-push and remove it. (and a force-push by someone else, adding my documentation immediately after I leave... that would be pretty fishy, too.)

Anyway, at someone's suggestion, I added a "three envelopes" reference in the access phrase generator section. I also wrote "Promises made outside of ES6 will not resolve" -- in the warning section of a document almost entirely about Rails. (because the boss has broken every single promise he has ever made me.)

What other hints and subtle warnings could I add?

(And hurry: tomorrow is my last day! ;3)

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

Me : "Hey the proxies aren't working anymore"

Them : "The what ?"

Me : "The what-you-call 'webs references'"

Them : Ooooh right

Yeah let's just call a cat a dog

Yesterday I got contracted by a recruiter through LinkedIn.

Lo and behold, SHE ACTUALLY READ MY INFO.

In the message there were references to my previous experience, my tech stack and others stuff.

That's a first for me, but it feels good to know that this kind of recruiters exist.

Some of you might already know that I'm a writer. I decided to take a break with my manuscript for my debut novel (titled Society's Trial) by working on my third manuscript. (I have lots of manuscripts lol.)

Anyway... This third manuscript involves a dev, so I obviously had to include Linux references :D

Also, I blacked out some parts because you probably don't want to read that haha.

(Also... All characters, dialogue, and etc are copyrighted by me. So don't be a jerk and end up copying my scene.)

A Geologist and a developer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the developer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Developer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Developer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Developer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Developer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the developer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The developer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the developer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the developer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

Not having finished any education, and writing code during interviews.

I have a pretty nice resume with good references, and I think I'm a reasonably good & experienced dev.

But I'm absolutely unable to write code on paper, and really wonder how some devs can just write out algorithms using a pen and reason about it, without trying/failing/playing/fixing in an IDE.

Education I think.

I can transform the theory on a complex Wikipedia page about math/algorithm into code, I can translate a Haskell library into idiomatic python... but what I haven't done is write out sorting functions or fibonacci generators a million times during Java class.

I don't see the point either... but I still feel utterly worthless during an interview if they ask "So you haven't even finished highschool? Can you at least solve this prime number problem using a marker on this whiteboard? Could you explain in words which sorting algorithm is faster and why?"

"Uh... let me fetch a laptop with an IDE, stackoverflow and Wikipedia?"

I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.

As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.

In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.

There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.

I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.

The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.

And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.

Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.

And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!

The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!

It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.

I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.

Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.

This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.

Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!

Our boss keeps mentioning that the company is good to people who put in long hours and work weekends. We're all salary and there's no extra money on the table; just references to bonuses.

I'm sure when I'm 75 and in hospital with pneumonia, the last thing going through my head will be, "Man, I wished I had worked more hours on that backend for the app for that fast food company that gives the world diabetes."

The company can't give me summer back. It can't give me a 30C day in the middle of the winter. Even asking employees to work long hours and on weekends constantly is a sign of poor management, poor planning and the inability to value people's individual time.

The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.

That sounds like a simple query, yeah?

Well.

Here's some background:

We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.

All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.

Here's how signups happen:

Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.

And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:

Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.

Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.

Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!

After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.

It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.

So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!

I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...

just...
errrrgghh

I'm so lucky, I have only a few null references in my life:

Null Pointer
Null Money
Null Girlfriend

The overhead on my JS projects is killing me. Today, I went to implement a simple feature on a project I haven't touched in a few weeks. I wasted 80% of my time on mindless setup crap.

- "Ooh, a simple new feature to implement. Let's get crackin'!"
- update 1st party lib
- ....hmm, better update node modules
- and Typescript typings while I'm at it
- "ugh yeah," revert one node module to outdated version because of that one weird proxy bug
- remove dead tsd references
- fix TS "errors" generated by new typings
- fix bug in 1st party lib
- clean up some files because the linter is nagging me
- pee
- change 6 lines of code <-- the work
- commit!

Beware of auto-generated customer references...

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

A dictionary is just a whole bunch of circular references.

Well, that's one for the bikeshed. Jonny Lee Miller would be proud.

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Development plus laboratories is kind of my expertise, so I ended up in a little grimey HR office looking out over the factory floor of a cocoa processing facility. I was applying for an automation job, a temp thing for three weeks, updating some ugly scripts which took readings from machines and threw them into excel sheets.

"We don't think a developer like you has enough experience working in an environment like this. Safety and working in sterile conditions is very important to us"

I had sent them my certifications in advance, plus references to the work I did in a biosafety level 3 lab for JnJ and cleanroom work at an aerospace company.

There were fat sweaty guys on sneakers, taking cocoa paste samples right next to the window.

They ended up hiring a friend of mine with zero experience, for minimum wage.

Just be fucking honest, don't waste my time with courtesies and lies. If they had just told me about the low salary indication, I would still have done the work. I was in between jobs anyway, bored, trying to fill up some spare time.

I know I am late to this but I have a happy story for this one.

My first dev job was awesome. Except for the pay. I had interviewed and taken the job based on the fact that I was done with my master's degree, but because of a paperwork snafu I wouldn't be receiving my degree until the spring. I was assured that if I provided proof of my degree when it was awarded I would get a pay rise in relation to my education. Well that was not to be. So this professionally and socially inept bitch I was working with was going to be ahead of me in her career because the people I worked for gave pay raises based on time served rather than ability and education.
So I started interviewing for other positions. Especially after government furloughs cut my pay by 20% for 11 weeks, causing me to max out my credit cards. All of my coworkers had my back. They went to the upper management and the higher ranking military people we worked for and explained the situation. They were my job references for my interviews. They got me a job that paid double what I was making. I still get the warm fuzzies thinking about it.
They were some of the sweetest people I had ever worked with. One of them gave my mom and brother a ride to the airport when I crashed my car. They bought me lunch when I was in dire straights. I really would have loved to stay but I couldn't afford it. That and winter in Utah fucking blows.

I love to put Easter eggs in my code.

Sometimes I use references from star wars >.>

Anyone else have Easter eggs they'd like to share?

Dev: Hi Guys, we've noticed on crashlytics that one of your screens has a small crash. Can you look?

Me: Ok we had a look, and it looks to us to be a memory leak issue on most of the other screens. Homepage, Search, Product page etc. all seem to have sizeable memory leaks. We have a few crashes on our screens saying iPhone 11's (which have 4gb of ram) are crashing with only 1% of ram left.

What we think is happening is that we have weak references to avoid circular dependencies. Our weak references are most likely the only things the system would be able to free up, resulting in our UI not being able to contact the controller, breaking everything. Because of the custom libraries you built that we have to use, we can't really catch this.

Theres not really a lot we can do. We are following apples recommendations to avoid circular dependencies and memory leaks. The instruments say our screens are behaving fine. I think you guys will have to fix the leaks. Sorry.

Dev 1: hhhmm, what if you create a circular dependency? Then the UI won't loose any of the data.

Dev 2: Have you tried looking at our analytics to understand how the user is getting to your screens?

=================================

I've been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to figure out how to respond before they come online. I am fucking horrified by those responses to "every one of your screens have memory leaks"

My now employees were the ones that interviewed me intially when I started workt where I am at.

Their right of the bad question was: "What is your favorite star wars movie, and from the expanded universs which is your favorite character"

We still joke about it. Because even tho I am a fan of the franchise (not much from the latest episodes tbh) I am not on their level of knowledge..... the amount of references they throw at me and the amount of lines these assholes are able to spit on command is, to this day, pretty fucking amazing imo

This is a friend's story:

So I've been trying to upload a free sticker pack for iMessage to AppStore for a while now. Why "trying"? because it keeps getting declined for the silliest reasons. It's nothing complex: just a bunch of our company's stickers about dev life. "Stickers for devs, from devs."

The first time Apple has declined the app because of the overall design, the second time it was because we used iMessage in the title. But this time it makes no sense at all. This is the message I got from Apple:

"Your app contains references to test, trial, demo, beta, pre-release or other incomplete content.
Specifically, some of your app’s stickers have “beta” references."

Huh? Check out the pic - one of our dev-related stickers says "still in beta". I guess Apple took that way too literally. Good thing they didn't tell me my app was too buggy because it has a sticker of a bug which says "it's not a bug, it's a feature"...

On second thought, what if AppStore is a modern-day Genie? Maybe I should add a sticker that says "Apple owns me $20 million in stock"? Or just one that says "Apple approves this sticker pack".

#Thisneverhappens_on_googleplay #appstore_make_a_wish #rookout

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

CR: "Add x here (to y) so it fits our code standards"
> No other Y has an X. None.

CR: "Don't ever use .html_safe"
> ... Can't render html without it. Also, it's already been sanitized, literally by sanitize(), written by the security team.

CR: "Haven't seen the code yet; does X change when resetting the password?"
> The feature doesn't have or reference passwords. It doesn't touch anything even tangentially related to passwords.
> Also: GO READ THE CODE! THAT'S YOUR BLOODY JOB!

CR: "Add an 'expired?' method that returns '!active'?"
> Inactive doesn't mean expired. Yellow doesn't mean sour. There's already an 'is_expired?' method.

CR: "For logging, always use json so we can parse it. Doesn't matter if we can't read it; tools can."
CR: "For logging, never link log entries to user-readable code references; it's a security concern."
CR: "Make sure logging is human-readable and text-searchable and points back to the code."
> Confused asian guy, his hands raised.

CR: "Move this data formatting from the view into the model."
> No. Views are for formatting.

CR: "Use .html() here since you're working with html"
> .html() does not support html. It converts arrays into html.

NONE OF THIS IS USEFUL! WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN READ MY CODE!?

dfjasklfagjklewrjakfljasdf

So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.

I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.

But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.

Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."

His response was:

"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.

You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."

So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.

Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.

Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍

I'm writing my bachelor thesis in LaTeX. As people who use LaTeX might know, it generates shitloads of files while compiling (like 10 files per .tex file).
To unclutter my project folder, I wrote a simple one-liner bash script that deletes all files which are not .tex or .bib files (literature references) and of course it will not delete itself (although that one also took me longer to figure out why my script 'kept disappearing for no reason after I ran it' than I'd like to admit).

However, I forgot that images are also files which are stored in the project-folder.
And this is how I suddenly lost all of my images for no reason at all, resulting in my PDF not building anymore. Luckily we all commit and push all regularely, right...

Edit: I just figured out that I'm even stupider than originally thought... My .gitignore ans more importantly, the '.git' folder also neither end in .tex nor .bib. Guess I'll just go fuck myself.

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

New to Java.
I was debugging for hours until I finally found the problem: "==" compares two strings' references, not their value.
I began to laugh tears!
Oh my fucking shit... I am a... damn it!

Because I’m a fucking cowboy and a charlatan, and because I hate sleep and despise feeling refreshed and happy, I’m working pretty much full time as a contractor (I’m the full stack dev. I do everything) on a (well funded) startup alongside my day job.

Tonight I had to make some quick (lol “quick”) changes to a core piece of the platform.

Now before continuing please refer back to the first line of this rant.

So instead of writing new functionality, I copied and pasted another section.

I renamed all references of “new_order” to, cleverly “new_order2”.

I know.

I deploy to production...

My phone starts blowing up. In short, everything is fucked.

I’m going over the query, checking the production database. Why is this manifesting like this? It all looks correct.

2 HOURS of broken sales, pissed off customers, pissed off service agents and I see that there was still one reference of “new_order” that should have been “new_order2”.

I am a piece of shit.

Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...

Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.

It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.

This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.

My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.

“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”

Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....

Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.

Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!

I am not a front end developer. Don't have the skill set, but I am learning. Work assigns me an "easy" task of modifying someone else's angular code(with all those <div> tags) to change some functionality. If it was well formatted, easy shit.

WHY THE FUCK DID THE PREVIOUS FUCKER INDENT LIKE THEY HATE ME? PARENT TAGS ARE FARTHER OUT THAN CHILDREN TAGS. SOME OF THE TAGS ARE 10 TABS FROM THE LEFT, WHILE THEIR CHILD IS ONLY 2. IN ADDITION, ALL THEIR CODE IS COPY PASTED FROM OTHER FILES, REFERENCES CONTROLLERS FROM OTHER PARTS OF THE CODE IT DOESNT NEED!

I am tempted to kill it with fire, find the person who wrote it(on a different continent), kill them, and then rewrite the whole thing in a language I am still learning. FUCK!

2010: haha yeah I use StackOverflow too
2011: SO, amirite?
2012: omg SO servers are down
2013: am engineer and I use SO to remember how to eat and breathe
2014: guys, what if SO was down. CODEPOCALYPSE!
2015: I use SO and have imposter syndrome
2016: omg, git checkout this SO meme on /r/programmerhumor
2017: I'd rather skin my mother alive than have SO dowb
2018: Stack fucking Overflow... like.. what if... you... can't... use it... in an interview...
2019: check my twitter @paresh, tons of SO references with barely intelligible english

just fucking drop dead, pieces of shit...

God damnit!
i recently inspected the c# sourcecode of a webservice, our webservice develop references to.

As i discovered a particular function in it, my face went instantly pale.

This golden-hammer function consists of ~2000 lines of code.
In the first line there is "try {".
On the last lines is "catch (Exception e) { throw new SomethingWentWrongException ("special function"); }"

At least, he "tried" xD

I don't want to develop on that planet anymore...

First rant (well, first on devRant anyway)! So, I'm working on a project to refactor a decade old codebase so that all references to ip addresses are in config. It sucks. But I did find an ascii art fish in an old cron script, so that's something.

One of the things I have no fucking patience for is bureaucracy. For the last year I've been working for a company I have no problem with, I like the place and I like the people here. Recently I was contacted by another company and offered a better salary to work for them. I was open about it with my boss and we both accorded that I will receive the same salary to stay (It was ok to me since I feel comfortable here), but in order to do that I'll have to sign a new contract. Ok, no big deal. Few days later a HR girl contacts me to send her all the documentation needed to elaborate a contract, and I was like 'You guys already have all my documents, been working here for a year'. But Ok, I tried not to be picky and just sent her everything again. Then she requests online psychometric tests, sends a shitload of formats to fill, like personal references, their company-custom resume format, privacy policies, and many more stupid and irrellevant paperwork nobody should need when a person has been working for you for a year and you want him to stay. I really tried to be patient and do everything the HR girl wanted me to do, but for one reason or other, she kept rejecting the formats I was sending (I had to download, print, sign, scan and resend many of them). We've been wrestling for an entire fucking week over this shit via email and she can't just write a new contract, make me sign it and leave me the fuck alone. The last thing she compained about was a stupid personal reference format I didnt scan with my signature on. This other company wants me to start next monday. I guess the next document I'll be sending her will be my resignation letter.

A customer forced you to use Comic sans and now you can't use it for your references..

Have u ever had the perfect job opportunity and u screwed up? This idiot just did!! 😓😭 It's a 100% remote c# role. I literally had the job, all I needed to to was be patient and wait. But, noooooo I had to go and turn down the offer because it was "taking to long". He was getting the proposal ready and I was growing impatient. It's been almost a month since I started talking to the CTO and we were/are on the same level of understanding. He told me today just hours after I consulted with someone who's a business owner and he helped me write an apology to him. Man do I feel like an idiot. He didn't ask for a resume or references. Just seen my GitHub and a few game I did and let me talk to the lead Dev and I was in. The lead Dev even told me "welcome aboard, can't wait to work with you." AND I still screwed this op up!! Now he's telling me he will talk to the CEO and see what he says cause it maybe out of his hands.😞😞😞😞😞😭😭😭😓😓😓 What fool I am, eh??? P.S. which makes it even worst is that he reached out to me via LinkedIn without me sending him my resume or applying for any job that had posted.

Past two days one of the senior devs has been complaining to anyone who will listen about a UI assembly containing 'hard-coded' references to a third party component causing several builds to break. The developer who added the telerik component probably had no idea the reference is pointing to his personal directory instead of a relative path. Easy fix? Uh...yea...but he just ranted to our boss for about 10 minutes about he has no idea how to fix the problem and the TFS build failure holding up his other projects.
WTF!? You fracking know what the relative path is!...just fracking change it and move the frack on.

The drama this drama-queen keeps spewing out is driving me out of my mind.

If you didn't think NodeJS dependency hell was that bad, you should try sequentially parsing a graph that's stored as an array of nodes and their references, where processing of said nodes forces you to use some async functions that depend on other async functions.

What should have been 20 lines of code written in 30 minutes has turned into 3 hours of horror, reading about babel, realizing that it's just adding more problems without solving one, assessing the effort of modification of async libraries to include sync methods as well, trying out asyncwait, async, and everything else there is, trying to rethink the recursive algorithm, rewriting it several times, cursing and hating myself for not choosing to use Python or .NET Core, screaming senselessly at my wife in a language as familiar to her as Klingon, crying in the bathroom, re-assessing my life choices, thinking whether it was a mistake to dedicate 10 years to this career, maybe I'm just not cut out for it since I can't handle this simple task, watching noose tying tutorials on youtube, thinking about my naked empty RPI that won't connect to the server any time soon.

Seriously. Why is it SO BAD?! Or is it just me?

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

Spent almost $20 on stickers with my gf and I don't regret a thing.. How many references can you get?

Finally removing all mysqli references and make the pdo statements, so we can finally switch to PHP 7.2

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

"These Monty Python references in Python tutorials are hilarious." Said no one ever.

When I get mad I purposefully just throw css at the bottom of the last css file references and declare everything with !important.

Sorry future self..figure it out next time.

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

-_- every time I use windows recently, I'm reminded of why I haven't for years... I swear, the simplest things are so freaking hard to do. It's like, windows doesn't support W, but blog post A references program B, which converts Z into Y, and after spending 3 more hours googling I find programs C and D, which convert Y into X, and then X into W. Were you able to follow along? Yeah, neither can I. The logo comes up and I immediately get PTSD and start falling down Alice's rabbit hole only to realize I've just wasted 5 hours of my life...

Unfortunately, ASUS is horrible and refuses to make even the most basic, minimally-functioning Linux drivers, or provide anybody with the resources to do it themselves, and they put everything on GPIO chips capable of frying the laptop!!! I'm so freaking done...

I feel like an adult locked in a child-safe playroom full of baby toys...

NewLifeNewHope update No.2 / Day 5

My Server Is finally opened and i installed 2x8 TB WDC Harddrives and SATA 128 SSD. I know this server is freaking garbage, but i got this PC for free, and have somewhat good-ish upgrade path, so heres the spec :
-Gigabyte H110m-S2 LGA1151
-Intel i3-6300
-8GB DDR4 single channel RAM
-128 GB SSD
-2x8TB Harddrives
-TP-Link 1000mbps NIC

so the plan is to make this server as the Main Repository -- yes no offsite backup plan for now -- and also i want to make this server as an Email Server and for hosting my company's website. I've already asked for static IP from my ISP and will take effect tommorow.

I need help for choosing the Operating System (i like centOS) for my server. and to setting this Server to work like what i planned but i don't know where to start, Any help and/or References will be great !

Nothing more depressing than a response like "No, no, no, we can't remove this old code. It doesn't matter that there's 0 references as of 3 years ago"

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

HOW. IN THE WORLD. COULD IT BE SO DIFFICULT TO COMMENT THE CODE I WRITE MYSELF ?

After my first project (you know, the "Working project I made for fun long ago" code everyone did once, but when you look at it again it looks like sorcery and there's no way to understand it ?), I decided that I'd comment almost everything I'd do... But...

When I begin a project, it's fiiiine and I do my comments the way they should be... AND THEN, WHEN DIFFICULTIES ARRIVES AND I START TO BE TIRED (ie : always) THEY START TO INCLUDE INSULTS OR WEIRD JOKES ABOUT THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, MOVIES REFERENCES, AND SOMETIMES THEIR LANGUAGE VARIES. (Like, that project you're doing in English and suddenly there's a comment written in French in the middle of that)

Soo, yeah, even if I do comment my shit now, it isn't more helpful, lol. Maybe I should listen to relaxing music when I code err.

Oh, comments. Damn comments. Someday I'll do those correctly. Maybe.

These were back in highschool and I was around 13 or 14, and no one taught me any html and have to figure it out myself by reading scarce references:

*When I started to try configuring my Friendster profiles with CSS ;
*when I successfully made cute sites for me and my friends in Geocities with personalized free domain names;
*Oh, i made little pages on local for my favorite bands;
*and, when I experienced computing shit at DOS level

Those are little things that drove me into learning indepth programming.

Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.

Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.

I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.

And there is no unit test or spec doc.

Fuck me dead

I’m slacking been so busy, forgot to post yet another book..

Soo here ya go..Engineering A Compiler.

For those who don’t like the Red Dragon compiler book for whatever reason, most don’t like it because they don’t believe the dragon book covers topics in a “Teachy way” and doesn’t explain certain things. As well as not cover one topic.

Then this may be the book for you. It’s significantly newer than the “Dragon book” and I believe it does do a better job laying out for “learning”.. I could see this book being used in universities.. I’m sure it is, but mine never had a compiler course so whatever. Good book

Fun fact.. it references the dragon book, as well as the other books the dragon book authors wrote as well as articles in the ACM..AND! It also references Knuths art of computer programming and other books of knuth AND references the Algorithms book. All books I have previously posted.

I have not read this book, only skimmed as I have recently received it this one. May do a follow up or even at it to the list to make a YouTube playlist going chapter by chapter thru the book.

It’s throw back Thursday folks...

Today’s post sets us back to a time long before the internet. Before C ... from the days of FORTRAN.. COBOL .. and LISP... How was info not taught in classes and published in large books shared???? Well it’s was journals like these, sent out monthly and quarterly for some. They would publish their findings to these type “magazines” but extremely technical.

This is one of the oldest editions have. Trying to collect them.

I believe in Knuths TAOCP, he references the first article of this edition... I’ve seen that article referenced in one of my books but i forgot which book.. pretty sure TAOCP.. anyway..

Just a fun throw back. Btw... just because it’s from 59’ doesn’t mean the information is irrelevant.. the information is facts the equations are true.

This new guy has a senior position and is 20 years older than me.
Im not a senior because I didn’t study (still have 10y of experience) and i don’t care about the title as Long as the salary is good.
But.. he sucks, he doesn’t know basics, keeps overengineering, I have to explain basic stuff to him over and over again like JOIN in sql, lambda, method references and async threads in java..

He probably makes much more than me and has a higher title..
I feel like nobody notices because I keep helping him to finish his shit.

That sucks!

Was fixing a bug and suddenly got an error that the lodash library could not be loaded. Funny, didn't even know the project used that lib. Looked for the reference and the previous dev used _.times instead of a for loop. Ha okay, interesting. Wonder where else this library is used.
Searched the whole project for references, dependencies, whatever, any sign of it. Fucking. Nothing.
Rewrote the _.times part as a simple for loop, then removed the library. The rest of the project still worked perfectly. Took me about a minute and a half.
Who the fuck uses an entire damn library to... Not write a for loop I guess?!

Now the following might shock you, read on with caution.

FUCK YOU DEVRANT.

I was writing a beautiful comment, i wrote an eassay you do not find anywhere else, i was about to spread more wisdom than the fucken bible.
Decided to search some stuff to put in some references, change back to devrant anD THE FUCKING APP RESTARTED LIKE IT'S NORMAL TO DO SO. RANT GONE, COMMENT GONE, WILL TO LIVE GONE.

THANKS FOR FUCKING NOTHING.

but in all honesty, who cares. Not a big deal.

Learning Rust.

Holy brainfucking brain melt, those references, scoping and borrowing and cloning and whatnot, because there is no garbage collector, but also no direct memory management.

It's cool, but also hard for a noob coming from the JVM/Android. The compiler error messages are helpful, but I immediately found some cryptic ones that don't help me at all.

A checkout application where, in the confirmation screen, everything (amount, references, currency, quantity of items, etc.) was sent to the client as a form, and they submitted this form to confirm.

...but there was no verification on any of the above. So any of the above could be changed and it'd collect whatever funds, and order whatever items, with whatever references you gave it.

This wasn't a major player in the space, but was big enough that most people would likely have heard of at least some companies using it. It's still being actively used today, and I can near guarantee not all the flaws have been fixed.

Two brainfarts that resulted in... a lot of pain

I had been coding all day, ~6hrs. I was in the zone, so I hadn't saved to git. It was all uncommitted changes (you see where this is going...)

Brainfart#1: The code used the "Contact" class, but for some reason my hands typed "Product" in this ONE line.

Brainfart#2: I became aware of Brainfart#1, so I changed the variable from "Product" to "Contact". However, I instinctively pressed F2, "Rename Symbol", instead of just changing the variable I was using. Now ALL of the references to "Product" were to the "Contact" class instead, across all of our code.

I finished coding. I committed and pushed the changes, closed the IDE, and left the desk for a snack. When I came back, the automated tests were failing due to an import error. That's when I noticed my mistake. I couldn't do Ctrl+Z because I had closed the editor. I had to change the names one by one across all of our code. "Contact" and "Product" are probably our two most used classes 😭

I proposed agile training to my company.
I choose a well known coach around here, with good references.

First 3 days were great. After a month he came back for another session and check progress.

This time, he literally fell asleep during the workshop. Several times. He would ask questions, sit down and quietly fall asleep while waiting for our answers.

We were astonished and embarrassed.

He apparently had a very hard working period and could not cope with traveling and working so much. He apologized some day afterwards and didn't charge us for the day.

He never came back. The team didn't take it very well and my reputation was compromised, as well as trust in the methodology I think.

I kept saying that everybody can have a bad day, but it was probably just to defend myself and my fucking stupid idea of changing the world.

A real fucking shame. Still I can't believe when I remember this.

Wow, i'm pretty sure that's not what i typed lol. Looks like we got another way to write 'Paris'.. (:

My previous manager reached out to me (we still work at the same company; different clients/projects/countries). Offered a very temporary project (1-2 months tops). I look at the client's requirements -- sounds super easy, doable in 1 month.

I dig more into the docs, details, other references. Turns out, this invitation has been published publicly and anyone could reach out to them applying for the project. Even I could, outside of my employer.

And the budget is $60k

And now I'm a bit mad at myself for not finding this page earlier. Had I been accepted for the job, I'd have earned $60k in 1 fucking month. And now I'll only get my usual salary

FUCK!

Definitely adding that website to my bookmarks.

LoL, why do we even have job reference contacts? So your previous manager can tell your new potential employer how much you sucked?

It's all so pointless..

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

Still looking for my first full-time dev role. After being endlessly rejected from every dev job I've applied for, it starts to eat away at your confidence. Makes me wonder if I'm not as competent as I believe I am. :/

Fortunately, I landed a coding interview with Google! It is my dream job to work at Google, so the fact that they even acknowledged me & my skillset makes me so happy and reaffirms my belief in my capabilities. :D

It's pretty odd, that after applying to 20+ open Google positions relevant to my skill level & location and often with references included, then having been rejected from all of them, that I finally got a chance with them when one of their recruiters found me on LinkedIn and liked what she saw. I cleared the screening call, and made it to the first coding interview.

Of course, even with all the interview prep I've done, it was all practically for naught since they caught me off guard with a crazy conceptual problem anyway. (Well, actually, was I 'caught off guard' if I was already expecting to be caught off guard? o.0) I struggled heavily in the first half of the interview, but found my footing towards the end. So I knew I screwed up and that it was highly unlikely for me to get the job.

Nonetheless, Google had the decency to reject me not via an automated email, but through an actual direct phone call with my recruiter. (The cruelty of the automated application rejection system in our society is a whole rant of its own, for another time.) My recruiter told me that they felt I wasn't ready but they liked what they saw, so they will be revisiting me in exactly a year to reconsider me.

To know that I wasn't fully rejected, and that my dream company Google sees real potential in me, is highly reassuring. It means I'm not a lost cause; I simply need to keep looking. Google will want me more strongly once I have the experience that comes from a fresh grad's first full-time job.

I Google
I stack overflow
I am an index that references
The internet memory

The modern day code-er mantra

The thing that I most hate is when you're approaching a new framework/tool, you follow the official documentation and the first example doesn't work.
I'm trying the official documentation of webpack, I tried the first example and guess! Error! It says that's probably a breaking change. Where the hell should I learn it? I don't have the crystal ball, should I guess how your fucking tool fucking works? Oh my god, it's ok if you introduced breaking changes, but just update all the references, is it so hard?

The flipside of too much googling for each and every API references is that one fails to answer simple interview questions..

Digital Forensics !
a whole new world ...

Got the course from packt.
Any other awesome references for that ?

Oh my god, GDScript is the single biggest piece of shit scripting language I have ever witnessed. It somehow manages to combine the very worst things of dynamic typing with the downsides of static typing, all in one bundle of utter shit

Imagine you have two game object scripts that want to reference each other, e.g. by calling each others methods.

Well you're outta fucking luck because scripts CANNOT have cyclic references. Not even fucking *type hints* can be cyclic between scripts. Okay no problem, since GDScript is loosely based of Python I can surely just call my method out of the blue without type hints and have it look it up by name. Nope! Not even with the inefficient as fuck `call` method that does a completely dynamic-at-runtime fuck-compile-time-we-script-in-this-bitch function call can find the function. Why? Because the variable that holds a reference to my other script is assumed to be of type Node. The very base class of everything

So not only is the optional typing colossal garbage. You cant even do a fucking dynamic function call because this piece of shit is just C++ in Pyhtons clothing. And nothing against C++ (first time I said that). At least c++ lets me call a fucking function

In the startup world... people don't always get along - and often disappear...

When the pull request

1. has 100s of files with commit messages that make a very little sense
2. has the source files sprinkled with duplicate looking code having enough differences to screw my visual diffing ability
3. has too many changes combined when they can be independently reviewed and merged
4. includes me as the sole approver when I don't have enough context on the changes
5. includes references to tickets without any description, justification for the change, testing methodologies, test results, performance metrics comparison, etc. Literally none. It is as if the developer wants me to work with them from the Beginning

An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.

Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:

HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);

And magic happened! The output was:

{1=1, 2=, 3=a}

That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.

I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.

Happiness hit me on the first day that we met; he was standing in my feeder with a face I can't forget!

I'm the creator of cheesy references, but I'm also currently waiting for a process to finish, and, before writing this, I tuned into one of my feeder 'cams, and I saw a little male downy woodpecker. This pleases me because I hadn't seen much activity at the feeders since these ones had been hanged, so his presence is very welcome! Thank God for Mr. Downy!

I am on a mission to go thru all the of bibliographies of all the books I have, and create a checklist of the books I have and don’t have, and continue to buy all the books in that list, add to the list for each new book I buy that references another book. UNTIL! The day I have a closed loop reference. to essentially “in this room all the books that each book references may also be found in this room, if the book isn’t in this room no other book references it.”

I applied for a dev job, ofc _without_ looking at their references before sending my candidature.
Turns out 80% of their references are porn sites...
Most of them are quite big as far as I can tell, but I don't really wanna work for a company like them. I'm still young, I don't really think it would make a good impression later on if I'd had a company who makes 80% porn sites in their portfolio in my CV when posting for more serious stuff.

And they asked me for a phone interview. Should I accept it?

[Rust]
I have a bunch of computational steps in a Rust program, all very expensive. They all depend on each other, forming a cycle-free and rather small graph of dependencies which is not a tree. The results of each of them for a given input are likely used tens of times by the others, so I would like to cache the subresults dynamically.

How would I go about doing this, considering that caching (rightfully) requires mutable access to the cache and multiple operations often refer to the same subresult?

I can't ask SO because they'd just tell me to use another language or recalculate everything every time, fully convinced that difficult questions can only emerge from design mistakes.

Why do recruiters always say "Would you like to hear more?" Aside from pissing people off with vague requests, you're missing prime Starship Troopers references, which is infinitely worse!

Fuck XCode! -
Yesterday I had the stupid idea to rename an icon file. Checked that XCode was building the application still fine. Ran it over the build server: Failed, complaining about the old missing icon file! Checked again and again, but there was no friggin' reference to the old file in the whole repo.
Log in to the machine clear the build folder and try to build the component again. Bang still same error and the references to no longer existing files reappear.
Turns out XCode was caching those references somewhere in the home directory as "DerivedData" and after deleting those, I could build again... but why on earth are you building a cache if you cannot properly invalidate it? Just to waste our time?
(@xcodesucks)

My best was my first - Dr Aston. Taught me Fortran.

The 1st ever essay I wrote on programming was littered with references to "and-sign". Prof calmly pointed out its called an "ampersand".

Just wondering if anyone out there has had any experience with writing a window manager for x11? I have decided that would be a good project to kinda work on my c++ and so I can learn how x-server works. Any tips, tricks or references you guys have? The project is on my github called zwm.

Have to find a memory leak in a huge, legacy JS application that builds, renders and handles (most) of the basic logic for completing forms - that only works when compiled into a minified js and put in another application that builds into a phonegap based app.
Did I mention everything is bound to a G(lobal) namespace and the ViewModel/Controllers etc. all use JQuery and "this" references and .bind() everywhere?

Deadline of fix: end of today/early tomorrow.

Today I learned that some external devs one of our projects is working with have DB tables where they store references to specific dates, and not only that, but every minute of those dates, and the day of the week, and what season its in. Im not joking.
Hmm should I use the local datetime libs or should I go through a firewall, load balancer and DB cluster just to find out what day it is?

I can't convince my team that a good database model promotes a good API design and a good UI/UX experience.

Instead, I have to work with a ridiculous table setup.

Imagine, if you will, a table (table B) that references another table (table A) via a foreign key. The FK is a string in both tables. And table A only has one column, which is labeled as "name".

The schema i have to look at it kind of like this:

Table parent
Name varchar(10) primary key

Table child
Name varchar (10),
parent_name varchar(10),
Foreign key (parent_name) references parent (name)

Sorry if the syntax is wrong, a little frustrated having to look at it...

Am I crazy to want to change this table design? Am I missing something? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because this is just scratching the surface of the problems I have to deal with.

Whatever the task needs.

New paradigm? Probably a book first approach.
Library/API: their own suggested tutorials and references cause that shit moves quick.

If I have to read a cave painting to understand an ancient card punch language I’ll happily do it.

I’ve found, when I don’t know something yet I get the “brick wall” feeling, that this is all going to be too difficult... I’ve learned to love that feeling.

If all else fails: RTFM.

I like Scala, but the docs suck.
The FAQ literally uses StackOverflow links as answers.
Not as references, where they write the complete answer and provide the link for reference or credits.
They actually just throw in the links.

My thesis supervisors gave me a set of templates and guidelines for the whole thing and argh.

they constantly assume that I've no fucking idea about academic writing despite the very good graded talks and texts I handed in in the past - granted, they probably often deal with inexperienced students.

but what they've given me.. a) the thesis template does not work, they fucked up some latex packages and b) there's a almost passive aggressive 3 page explanation on academic writing and how wo work with sources and references and they forgot the fucking references lol. There are none included and the references all go like [?].

We accepted a property listing project for a client.
I have been looking online for references and inspiration regarding design, features, plugins etc.

And this is what I just found. I shit you not. $20 and you get everything. WTF.

May be I will just buy it and give it to my client. $20 and you have like 40 lines of features, if not lied, which are more than enough to meet my client's requirements.

Why the heck am I working?
Am I the one who is charging too high to my client?

Man all I ever do is fix bugs in a giant overgrown calculator, that has references to code before I was even born. It might be new job time

"We don't use nuget, it isnt secure. We just put all the dll's into a nuget directory thats available to all of the users in the company."

"But that means your references are all broken and your packages.config are wrong? None of your solutions build that are in source."

"We don't check in solution files either. That causes clutter in TFS."

Learning Java Spring, their official documentation is a fucking mess. Can't get any useful information other than got dumped with loads of confusing terms/packages references/libraries.

baeldung blog site is better than the docs to some extend, but still, very fragmented information.

Ok enough ranting.. Any good learning resource recommendation? Forum?

The Zen Of Ripping Off Airtable:
(patterned after The Zen Of Python. For all those shamelessly copying airtables basic functionality)

*Columns can be *reordered* for visual priority and ease of use.

* Rows are purely presentational, and mostly for grouping and formatting.

* Data cells are objects in their own right, so they can control their own rendering, and formatting.

* Columns (as objects) are where linkages and other column specific data are stored.

* Rows (as objects) are where row specific data (full-row formatting) are stored.

* Rows are views or references *into* columns which hold references to the actual data cells

* Tables are meant for managing and structuring *small* amounts of data (less than 10k rows) per table.

* Just as you might do "=A1:A5" to reference a cell range in google or excel, you might do "opt(table1:columnN)" in a column header to create a 'type' for the cells in that column.

* An enumeration is a table with a single column, useful for doing the equivalent of airtables options and tags. You will never be able to decide if it should be stored on a specific column, on a specific table for ease of reuse, or separately where it and its brothers will visually clutter your list of tables. Take a shot if you are here.

* Typing or linking a column should be accomplishable first through a command-driven type language, held in column headers and cells as text.

* Take a shot if you somehow ended up creating any of the following: an FSM, a custom regex parser, a new programming language.

* A good structuring system gives us options or tags (multiple select), selections (single select), and many other datatypes and should be first, programmatically available through a simple command-driven language like how commands are done in datacells in excel or google sheets.

* Columns are a means to organize data cells, and set constraints and formatting on an entire range.

* Row height, can be overridden by the settings of a cell. If a cell overrides the row and column render/graphics settings, then it must be drawn last--drawing over the default grid.

* The header of a column is itself a datacell.

* Columns have no order among themselves. Order is purely presentational, and stored on the table itself.

* The last statement is because this allows us to pluck individual columns out of tables for specialized views.

*Very* fast scrolling on large datasets, with row and cell height variability is complicated. Thinking about it makes me want to drink. You should drink too before you embark on implementing it.

* Wherever possible, don't use a database.
If you're thinking about using a database, see the previous koan.

* If you use a database, expect to pick and choose among column-oriented stores, and json, while factoring for platform support, api support, whether you want your front-end users to be forced to install and setup a full database,
and if not, what file-based .so or .dll database engine is out there that also supports video, audio, images, and custom types.

* For each time you ignore one of these nuggets of wisdom, take a shot, question your sanity, quit halfway, and then write another koan about what you learned.

* If you do not have liquor on hand, for each time you would take a shot, spank yourself on the ass. For those who think this is a reward, for each time you would spank yourself on the ass, instead *don't* spank yourself on the ass.

* Take a sip if you *definitely* wildly misused terms from OOP, MVP, and spreadsheets.

TL;DR Shit programer trying pass off stealing code as "Recycling"

Backstory:
Client hires senior dev. He lied and knows nothing. Has been causing havoc in production since day 1. My crusades to defend production have been without much success.

Since he wants to LITERALLY put his name on every big project, he finds any reason to make a new version of it (or make a slight astetic modification) to say he did something.

The client doesn't know or care about the programming side of things. Which means it is incredibly difficult to get him to understand the issues this brings. Not to mention that the "senior dev" is acting as a consultant to the client, altering the facts.

Story:
The piece of shit, is trying to make a new version of a big project. It was originally made by my mentor. Again, if you are using someone else's work to complete your own, I don't care. But if you take 99% of another person's work and then say...

"I took and existing project, which was similar to what I'm trying to make. Then I modified it to fit our needs."

Fuck you man!

You took someone else's work. Now you're trying to present it as your own. No references to our team. Again, there is literally nothing new about this project. It's exactly like the original. The client didn't even ask for this.

let me preface with the fact that I'm now known at my new job for being the resident cli hipster. I can't lay any claims to knowing if it's "better" but I like it, I don't care if you do or don't, it just works for me and my flow

so at my job, we generally squash all our commits into one commit and delete the source branch upon merging; i accidentally committed all my work to an old, already merged branch, so my boss tells me it would be more of a PITA with the weird references we would encounter by merging the branch again, rather than just cherry pick the commits into a new branch, which i'm like "eh, fine.".

HIM: "You want to share your screen so we can resolve this?"
ME: "k"
HIM: "Oh, you won't be able to do this in a terminal, you are going to have to load up a GUI of some sort"
ME: "lawlz, no you don't"
HIM: "i highly doubt you will be able to accomplish that, but if you wanna make an ass of yourself, i'll humor you"
ME: "yeah, watch this"

> git log > log.txt
> git checkout <new branch>
> git cherry-pick <copy-paste-full-commit-hash-here>
> git push

ME: "done"
HIM: "what? there's no way you did it that easily, where are all your other commits???"
ME: "i usually try to amend my commits since we squash them anyhow. it really helps in situations like this"
HIM: "well, you go girl"

roll that up in your fancy degree and smoke it, why don't ya?

I'm making the communication in my company. So I have to make facebook posts to link our product.
That could be fun if only I could use memes, jokes and pop culture references. Unfortunately, our targets are seniors. So, always same format, always same sentences, always same images. I'm bored.

I have a nightmare project that I will probably be ranting about quite a lot in the coming weeks, but I don't want SEO to pick up the specifics on the off chance my peers Google the issues we're facing and my profile comes up.

Let me set up the scene by describing the predicament, and then I'll get to the most outrageous thing I've heard while working at this job. It gives you a CLEAR idea of why we're in this situation in the first place.

Anyways, the nightmare project only runs in IE with compatibility mode set to version 6. So it only runs in IE 6 at the latest.

And it is massive. I'm talking real, real enormous.

The most recent roadblock I ran into while Chrome-ifying it is the extensive use of a browser API that was removed 8 years ago.

It involves synchronous data input and I know for a relatively certain fact there's no way to fix it without combing through every single reference to this API and converting the ones that need sync data (not all of them do) to callbacks. How big of an issue is that?

Well, just one of that 15-ish modules has over 900 references to it. Even just creating a spreadsheet of "commented out / doesn't need a fix / needs fix" for each reference in 1/15th of this project would take days of manual labor.

Here's the rant.

So after discussing this issue in the meeting (we ended on "they don't believe me that we can't just replace it with jQuery") I brought up the next issue. One of our 3rd party libraries is so old it doesn't work anymore and we can't modify that code (it's compiled).

They said that even if it was backwards compatible (no fucking way. This version is like, at least 10 years old, I guarantee it) they can't simply replace it because we don't have a subscription to this product anymore (suggesting we find an alternative).

And I fucking kid you not, this is what happened next.

They then began discussing how this is why you shouldn't use 3rd party code. Because it becomes obsolete and you can't even fix it yourself because it's not yours to edit.

Yes. They said this DIRECTLY after we discussed our 900+ references to a browser API >>REMOVED<< 8 years ago. Yes, they said this about a 3rd party library that receives regular support but is totally FUCKED because we NEVER updated it after adding it and we never even renewed the LICENSE.

What the FUCK

Fucking Visual Studio is such a piece of shit. 2 years ago we created a solution for our 7 webclients with 30 projects (clients, common stuff, tests, ...).
Things were ok, we could change something, save the file and everything was built and we just had to reload the client. Only F12 between the projects does not work.

But now the studio doesnt get shit done. Opening the clients solution after a clean checkout takes 5 minutes, saving doesnt build anymore, building breaks the project because it cant find references, rebuilding works but takes 3 minutes. When you have a syntactic error in a file the fucking thing almost crashes and becomes unresponse for a few seconds. It randomly shows errors in some files that disappear once you rebuilt it, sometimes it builds but still shows an error in that file.

But at least we will soon rewrite the clients in angular5 and dont need this piece of crap software anymore for the front end.

If I only could get my team to use another technology for the server so that I dont have to see this big pile of shit anymore. Fuck Visual Studio.

So Igot that Samsung DeX thing a while ago. So far, it was just a nice gadget to have at hand, but I didn't get to use it properly since my laptop was always the better option sort of.
Now.
My power adapter for the laptop died last friday. I have a second one at home, but of course, I pack the wrong one for work.
Ended up working the entire day on the DeX. Thankfully, I just needed to do some web and office based stuff, and all the necessary documents are online anyway.
So that thing just saved my butt today, which is nice. Took a while to get used to, but it does it's job quite nicely.

To be honest: Iam suprised it works the way it does. Oh what a time to be alive...

Now the question is...
Can I get Ubuntu on here somehow? I did find a Tmux? shell and was able to download some ubuntu onto it, but it had gpg issues.
Anyone got more references? Ubuntu on Android 8.

I'm fixing our wrapper for API calls. The typescript for it was nice and simple, except that halfway through it casted almost everything as `any` and then hand-typed the expected return type :)))

Took me almost two weeks to work through that wretched piece of code, I managed to get the types actually correct... but now it started to catch incorrect calls, so I have to go through quite a lot of files to fix the references. But the worst part?

Now it breaks unit tests.
Turns out, multiple frontend unit tests DID NOT MOCK API CALLS AT FUCKJNG ALL HGGHGGHHHHHH. I WONDER WHY THE TESTS WERE TAKING SO FUCKING LONG TO RUN. I AM FUCKING FROTHING AT MOUTH AND I MIGHT NEED TO BE PUT DOWN OR I WILL START BITING PEOPLE

To all the masochists who spent hours debugging misspellings:

1. Learn your tools
2. Learn good practice

Every IDE should point out when you're not using a variable you've initiated or using an uninitiated variable as well as at least highlight, if not simply list, every occurrence of the variable under your cursor and let you find all references or even display the number of references next to a variable at all times, and finally, every IDE should autocomplete for you so when it doesn't you know you've messed up. Good IDE makes all the easy mistakes hard and all of the hard tasks easy. Including running tests. If you don't know how to configure your IDE to do all these things take time and learn it. If you still can't figure it out, replace your IDE maybe...?

Also use the debugger. Preferably one that nicely integrates with your IDE. If you don't, check point 1.

Also write tests and *run them*.

Also if your misspellings tend to consist of a missing `s` at the end of a plural noun just call it `entityCollection` instead of `entities`. And read up on more good programming practices and naming conventions.

We've been using JIRA for over half a year now, and my colleagues still can't use it properly.

I've never had the problem, but to some amazing technological feat, every time they create a ticket, it "disappears", so they make a NEW ticket with just the title references to the actual one.

Love my daily review of JIRA, it's like a fucking raiders of the lost ark scene.

"ooooo what does this one mean, perhaps there is a clue if i shine a light on it just right"

jesus christ incompetence is rampant

"=$B1*INDEX(A:A,ROW())"

See this absolute bullshit right here?

This fucking cunt of a problem designed by some dippity-do finger-painting fucking jackass at google doesn't work why?

Because for some *god damn reason* they decided it would be a good idea to setup it up in a way that when you use absolute cell references in a formula, you can't use functions in the formula too. No the other side has to be a literal or cell reference apparently.

Motherfuckers.

I should wait a bit longer before sharing this but looks like I am going to get a fulltime contracting position in a company that develops Netflix-like on-premises solutions for global brands, TV channels and telcos. I would with the team write hybrid app targeting phones, tablets, IP Tvs & consoles. I am waiting for them to call my two references and then voilà. Byebye e-commerce and WordPress, Welcome JS, React and Haxe. So excited this morning.

Oops accidentally created this Angular component in the wrong directory. Better run the Ng command to remove the component so I don't need to remove the files and references in app.module.ts otherwise it would take an annoying amount of time to track down the right lines there and it also opens the door to human error!

......shit

Not a rant, but a question.

Why is their so much fear of Google and Microsoft misusing information they collect?

What proof is there of this (provide references and cases, for a proper argument)?

What would you have these companies do to resolve the issues you brought up above?

I'm sorry if I seem ignorant, I'm genuinely unaware of all this. I'm willing to learn provided it's a fair analysis.

Reading documentation for 3rd party software... come across a code snippet which references a class. The class is spelt correctly in the comment but wrong in the code!

What??? Surely if you're going to get it wrong it would be the other way round :/

4 really basic questions. Things you can't get through 1st year undergrad without knowing. One was testing you understand references, one testing understanding of inheritance, then exception handling... Then a bit of a tricky one: what happens when you query 2 tables in sql without a join. That took me a second because it's just not something I'm used to doing.

So yeah it's pretty basic stuff. At this point I was used to writing fairly long code snippets and quizzes with lots of gotchas that make the interviewers feel really smart. I think "ok they basically want to make sure I'm not totally useless and they're fine with training me". But noooooo. Being able to answer all that correctly is really impressive. That's never happened before. I'm a fucking prodigy.

So I got the job and I alternate between thinking I'm in Idiocracy and thinking the reception I get is some sort of elaborate joke

So there is this discussion about killing children in code. Someone pops in with this:
"I do remember a post from a guy who actually got pulled into an HR talk, to ask why he'd littered the code with references to killing children and removing children from their parents. Imagine trying to explain to a person who's never programmed, that Kill(parent.child)is a perfectly standard phrasing and not a latent psychosis that should be reported to the police."

First I think who is the idiot that reported this? Then I think who is the HR idiot that didn't do a google search or talk to the software manager? So many people had to fail at basic thinking for this to get this far.

Then I think also. Two things can be true at the same time. The person writing this code could also harbor latent desires to kill children. But can hide their sickness in plain sight. CS could just be a place for psychopaths to talk about the true serial killer thoughts.

I was wondering what this would look like. Maybe the psycho programmer will allocate extra hidden children that will get created and destroyed without anyone knowing the better. Maybe they only need 10 children for the code, but they allocate 100. That is 90 children they can create and destroy that only they know about.

Is balancing a tree really about cycles to read the data? Or is this some sort of karma balancing with latent desires to add or remove children with different karma leanings? Linked lists? Obviously only a psychopath would make a singly linked list.

Then I read posts on devrant and think there is probably at least one psychopath here that looks up to Anakin. We know you are here! You can't hide forever.

In large projects, eclipse is so bad that rename of a class can last up to whole minute.
make that an new class, 0 references. still whole minute. How can you fuck up so badly???

Hi XXXX,

Thanks for speaking to me earlier,

If you could send me the following details we can really get the ball rolling with the recruitment process.

• Any jobs you have applied for or interviewed (I need company name and position)

This stops me re applying you for jobs you’ve already applied for

• Any key elements an employer has to have for you

• A name phone number and position held for references at your current contract.

If we can get these over asap then we can start the ball rolling and get you a new position in the most time effective manner.

Kind Regards,

Brainless Lazy Back-Stabbing Recruiter.

(This is the third time I'm talking about the same question I posted on stack overflow this week, but things keep happening that pisses me off)

Me: *answers my own question, clearly says I tried deleting the php path environment variable and that it didn't work, so that's why I added it back and now it's working perfectly*
Guy: *downvotes my answer* "you need to delete the php path environment variable, here's how"
M: "I did and it didn't work, that's why I added it back and now it's working"
G: "well, you need to delete the php path environment variable"

YOU MOTHERF-

G: "You need to check for all the references"

WERE? You literally only talked about environment variables, I told you I checked those multiple times. Obviously I don't know what I'm doing, if I did I wouldn't be asking such a stupid question like this one, so maybe a little guidance? I mean, isn't that what stack overflow is for? To guide people who don't know how to do something? Don't just say "your wrong" when I said MULTIPLE TIMES I did what you said and it DIDN'T WORK.

Seriously, asking a question there was the worst thing I did 😑

Anyway, he didn't answer back and everything is still working fine, with the php path.

A lot of this might be an assumption based on not enough research on both NestJS and TypeScript, so if something here is not well put or incorrect then please feel free to provide the necessary info to correct me since I care far more about getting dat booty than I do being right on the internet :D

Sooo, a year or so ago I got a hold on the Nest JS framework. A TypeScript based stack used to build microservices for node. Sounded good enough in terms of structure, it is based on the same format that Angular uses, so if you use Angular then the module system that the application has will make sense.

I attempted (last night) to play with the framework (which I normally don't since I am not that much of a big fan of frameworks and prefer a library based approach) and found a couple of things that weird me out about their selling points, mainly, how it deals with inversion of control.

My issue: This is dependency injection for people that don't really understand the concept of dependency injection. SOLID principles seem to be thrown out of the window completely due to how coupled with one another items are. Literally, you cannot change one dependency coming from one portion to the other(i.e a service into a controller) without changing all references to it, so if you were using a service specification for a particular database, and change the database, you would have to manually edit that very same service, or define another one....AND change the hardwire of the code from the providers section all the way into the controllers that use it....this was a short example, but you get the gist. This is more of a service locator type of deal than well....actual dependency injection. Oh, and the documentation uses classes rather than interfaces WHICH is where I started noticing that the whole intention of dependency injection was weird. Then I came to realize that TypeScript interfaces are meeheed out during transpilation.

Digging into the documentation I found about custom providers that could somehowemaybekinda work through. But in the end it requires far too much and items that well, they just don't feel as natural as if I was writing this in C# or Java, or PHP (actually where I use it the most)

I still think it is a framework worth learning, but I believe that this might be a bias of mine of deriving from the norm to which I was and have been used to doing the most.

c++ has a little bit of a learning curve, I think.

Used smart pointers everywhere in my code because I heard that's what we gotta do nowadays.

When learning about shared vs unique vs weak, I disregarded weak pointers because I didn't really understand them.

"That sounds like something for liberal pansies", I said to myself, then continued on with my STRONG shared and unique pointers.

Now my app leaks memory like a MOTHERFUCKER, if you can believe that.

So now I need to go back and manage my object lifetime with more intent instead of just making everything a shared pointer. Fuckin circular references. Fuckin reaping what I fuckin sow. God damn.

I'm going to re-try my ConsoleWidgets/ CursesWidgets project from complete scratch. Here are some things I learned and will do better this time with:

- Keep people updated on progress to maintain motivation (Hence this post)

- Centralize drawing, eliminate curses entirely besides in this static class.

- Don't worry about complicated rendering until basic rendering is done. I really got stuck up on text rendering last time.

- Sort out a color system from the very beginning, and make it as simple as possible. Working with curses, it is a good idea to have a color manager.

- Research how to logically render two items - both sized to 50% of the screen - when there are an odd amount of pixels available.

- Only make one type of widget at the beginning. Don't worry about Buttons and Sliders and such until the base Widget class is completed.

- Truly decide if I want to call them Widgets or Controls

- Don't worry about supporting multiple curses windows. Got hung up on that too. stdscr will do for everything I need.

- Cache inflation values so that they need not be re-calculated each render. Re-calculate on resize.

- This is more of a c++ thing, but drop pointers in favor of references. It's 2018. I have already started to do this in other projects but THIS IS THE ONE.

Can someone give me references for building an AI and raspberry pi projects? Python 2 language

when VS thinks it doesn't have OpenTK references but your project compiles fine and references are well set.

How do you actually make an AI (without if statements)?

I don't need the code or anything. Just