Sent intern a regex pattern, mans saw it and thought I had sent him a virus.

Somewhere in that code there's a
"TODO learn regex"

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

Today a colleague was making weird noises because he was modifying some data files where half of the data needed to be updated with a name field, there were 4 files all about 1200 lines big.

I asked how he was doing and he said he was ready to kill himself, after he explained why I asked why he was doing if manually. He said he normally uses regex for it but he couldnt do this with a regex.

I opened VS code for him, used the multiselect thing (CTRL+D) and changed one of the files in about 2 minutes. Something he was working on for over half an hour already.... He thanked me about a million times for explaining it to him.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you have a tedious task which takes hours, please ask if somebody knows a way of doing it quicker. Doing something in 2 minutes is quite a bit cheaper and better for your mental state than doing the same thing manually In 3 hours (our estimate)

Today I wrote a regex expression that worked on the first try. Today I learned that the hardest code to debug is bugless code.

A small bug is found.

Chad dev:
😎 *Exists*
> Writes a simple ad hoc solution in a few lines
> Self documenting code with constant run time
> No external dependencies needed
> Fixes the bug, easy to test and does not introduce any new issues

That guy nobody likes (AKA. regex simp coder):
🤡 'This can be "simplified" into oNE LiNe'
> Writes a long regex expression that has to line wrap the editor window several times
> Writes an essay in the comments to explain it's apparent brilliance to the peasant reader
> Exponential run time (bwahahah), excessive memory requirements
> Needs to import additional frameworks, requires more testing that will delay release schedule
> Also fixes bug but the software now needs 2x ram to run and is 3x slower
> Really puts the "simp" in simplified, but not the way you would expect

If archaeologists from 1000 years in the future find a fossilized copy of your code? What would they think about it?

Regex would definitely classify as alien manufacture.

There ain’t no feeling like replacing 6 lines of code with 6 characters of Regex.

I just wrote this piece of code. Without googling. Call me regex king!
But in fact regex is not that hard, you just have to learn the syntax 😄

Oh dear, a scaling problem I solved was replacing some Regex matching with simpler string functions. While I'm a huge fan of Regex, it's unreal how much performance they can suck out of some high-n loops...
I got about 120x out of some critical code thus making a CPU upgrade unnecessary.

Fuck regex and everyone who has ever endorsed the use of and/or is affiliated with regex.
It's unreadable, impractical, overly complex and complicated and it adds unnecessary clutter to your code, and your thought process.
It's 00:50 am and I just spent 3 hours debugging a regex only to realise forgot a single "?" in a 75+ character long string and I want to go to bed.

New developers(5-6 years experience) these days are so pathetic. They dont have any sense of code review. All they want is to put their opinion out without giving any thought.

I had a PR for review today which contains mock specification to match a regular expression and return the corresponding response

The regular expression I put was

104000(02|06|20|48)

Now, this guy comes and puts a comment that we could "simplify" as 104000\d{2}

I replied, the ending digits are not contiguous. The specific pair of digits have to match for these mocks.

Then this guy replied, then we could simplify as 104(0{4}(2|6)l0{3}(20|48)).

I said, I cannot understand how that is simplification. Why do we need such a complex regex to match something very straight forward.

And the guy replied, we should be writing proper regexes, otherwise we could just specify everything explicitly.

I was like WTF man. You try deciphering this next week without taking at least a minute to know which values are matched.

Anyhow, another senior person approved my PR, and I merged it.

The only serious, as in customer affecting, bug I never git fixed was an indexing bug that caused an exception requiring manual intervention by one of us.

Despite going at it for many years I never found the root cause before I left the company.

The reason it was so difficult was that it only occurred every second month or less and with different customers.
It was also not triggering directly when the error occurred but a while later once the error had caused accumulated errors until one value got negative.

Also, it was a combination SQL, backend code and frontend js and the time from initial error until an invalid value could be hours, days or even weeks.

And we never ever managed to replicate it our self and found no common pattern between occasions.

We think it was some kind of race condition when updating the db that caused duplicate values or a hole in the index series (db transaction or db index was not an option for various reason that would require a redesign of the central tables and most if the central code).

This then grew into multiple error on consecutive updates until one f them resulted in a negative number that then caused a regex in js to fail.

I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN

I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.

My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.

The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).

At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.

I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.

It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.

Me: yo DEV2 parse this string into a hashmap. Use regex, 2 rows of code are enough for the job
DEV2: implemented 40 rows of switch/if cases into nested for loop.

Please kill me 🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫🇮🇹

Slowly getting better with RegEx problems! Warning, lots of non-computer linguistic geekiness ahead.

Been working on some functions recently to replicate the furigana (Chinese character annotation) functions available over at JP.SE in PHP for a project.

Managed to get the basic cases down fairly quick:

[Chinese character][reading] => <ruby><rb>Chinese Character</rb><rt>Reading</rt></ruby>

However I realized this evening that there are patterns where this repeats twice for one word, such as the following:

[Chinese Character][helper Japanese character(s)][Chinese Character][possibly optional word ending][reading for the whole thing]

Managed to get it working for both cases initially, but then I found out that adding a Japanese character to either of my test strings (see graphic) would cause the annotations to fall grossly out of sync. The next two hours disappeared pretty fast before discovering that the issue was that I was removing the wrong string length from the annotation string, and just happened to luck out with a test case where it worked the first time.

Probably going to do a code review of it with the intern next time he's in. One of the things I've been stressing to him lately is that however easy a task may be for a human, there are all kinds of extra things that need to be tracked in order for a computer to be able to follow your logic.

I once reviewed some code that parsed HTML using regex (red flag #1), and it turns out that it had to be done that way because the company's HTML was so malformed that no actual parser would accept it without erroring

The site I work on is a market where you can buy magnets for dolors, insomniaque, bla bla bla (I don't believe a sec in this).
Just saying that to settle that 80% of our customers are +45 years old. They weren't born with a computer in their hands, and they sometimes manage to make a lot of mess in the site.
We are based in France, and we sell the most in France (no shit) and Switzerland. And this is the third time that a Swiss pass a command, puts all her address in Switzerland EXCEPT for the country (still on France) so she doesn't have to pay the shipping fee. I should do something about that, like a regex when verifying the zip code, but I have more urgent work to do, and the best has to come.
This smartass doesn't know she is the joke, because by saying she is in France, she has to pay the VAT that she wouldn't have if she said she was in Switzerland. She buys in general for around 350 €, so she has ~ 70€ (20%) in VAT, and she would only pay 14€ in shipping fee.
Maybe one day she'll see how dumb she is (my boss already mailed her so she pays attention to it, no change). But I think I would have set the regex by then.

Ah, the little subtle things we have to iron out as we progress from Junior Developer to Medior Developer.. things like:

- knowing the difference between a carriage return and a line feed (although having worked with analog typewriters helps) and later knowing that Unix-based systems and Windows NT-based systems implement it differently..

- knowing that serialization is important because not all computers interpret data the same way and some computers allocate 4 Bytes for a construct, others 16 Bytes.. and then we get the funkiness of transferring character sets between machines..

- knowing that a whitespace character is not only an actual space (as is known in ASCII as code 32). This one can cause even medior developers a headache, as in: why the fuck does this string function say that "hello I am a duck" and "hello I am a duck" are not the same?! Turns out then in the debugger that when you expand every character in the string you see that string1 contains 32 32 32 32 as usual.. but then string2 contains -96 -96 -96 -96 and you're like.. what the fuck..? Then you know you have to throw \\h regex at it. Haha.

- finalizing our objects and streams (although modern languages do that for us).. otherwise we have to do funky shit like trying to find what's locking a file, which is not so easy to figure out.

- figuring out why something won't work often requires you to not only break down the problem in smaller steps, to use a debugger, but sometimes it's even better to just create a proof of concept, slap some minimal code in there and debug that.. much easier.

- etc.

:)

>Gets assigned to this private Game server's project
>Boss wants me to improve the anti advertisement chat
> k
> Looks at old code
> Code is replacing unicode characters to latin ones that look similar which are being used for advertising
> lol'd who tf developed this
> regex101, building a regex query with endless of possibilities (would look something like this) /((L|\|_|I_)(O|0|\[\]|\(\))(L|\|_|_))/gi to detect lol
> Adds alot of similar looking unicode characters to assure that it will find something
> Works really well in the dev version
> Server open hour
> 30 players
> All chat at the same time
> CPU 100%
> BOSS NEVER TOLD ME TO MAKE IT EFFICIENT

I don't want to use Visual Basic!

I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?

The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.

He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!

Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!

At work we have to split a potentially large ID into 2 10-digit long parts that will be passed to an outside system that will later return them with some more data to us.

A colleague had implemented it using regular expression, it passed code review, everything was ok, until he noticed a potential problem. For some cases, because the outside system stores them as int and therefore will remove any leading zeros, there will be no way to reconstruct the number.
So we brainstorm and I propose ether a modified regex, or to just use math like part1 = id % 10^10 and part2 = floor(id % 10^10) and then we can reconstruct it simply by: part2 * 10000000000 + part1

Colleague: - Well, the regex will be faster, there won't be any calculations
Me: - :| I disagree but ok..

We do some more brainstorming and testing and find a case where the proposed new regex fails as well
So I bring up my previous proposal, I explain what exactly it does.

Colleague: - I don't like the math, it has calculations, which won't be needed before we reach the 11th digit

Have I missed some major development in computer hardware? When did they become bad/slow at doing math? :|

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

Today after longer vacation I came back to work.

Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.

Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.

Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.

Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.

Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.

Annoying, but ok.

Then I tried my scripts...

They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.

Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.

Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?

Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.

Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.

3 hours later...

Made the ticket to rewrite it.

I did nothing wrong at all.

The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.

Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.

I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....

Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....

How can someone be so brain damaged -.-

My last post was a year ago. What brought me back here is the ability of AI to agree and apologize to anything and everything, while producing the worst hopeful code.

4 days I wasted, trying to make an android audio visualizer, but AI... sigh.
It gave me the wrong structure of FFT bytes emitted. I corrected it
It gave me the wrong logarithm calc, I corrected it
It gave me the wrong sampling rate, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong texture order, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong glsl sample2d, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong textureID generation, I corrected it.
It gave me a render which was about 10 fps, I found out that instead of using native onDraw, I had a fcking delta time in my shader. I almost corrected it, I gave up

Lets go to code generators with Annotations.
Like always, starts very positive, until I start to correct it.
It gave me the wrong file locations, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong order of find copy modify and write to .build, I didnt correct it.
It gave me regexes to find annotations. Im like So whats the use of an "ANNOTATION PROCESSOR"
It apologizes and used a fucking regex in the processor,..... I didnt correct it, in the end, I was left with a separate module, targetting iOS Android and JVM, with an annotation processor implemented in jvmMain, which tries to modify commonMain src by finding annotations with regexes, which wont run on app build or app sync project, but only on java -jre command pointing to that fucking .java class in that module, which takes at least 2 mins to run, and Finally generate 0 files.

I needed to rant, I understand LLMs are just models of words built and stolen from the most intelligent and dumbest people out there. But Im an idiot for getting my hopes high. I cant build anything new and unheard of. I used to do that. I once made a textView + image print util for a bluetooth printer just to say FU to libraries and heavy sdks. like literally rasterizing shit to bluetooth packets. I needed to let off some steam. I havent been here in a year so I dont know what reactions I can get from this rant. I bet someone will just say yeah we tired of 'Fuck AI' rants. but shit, it hurts. When I gave up on that visualizer, I downloaded an app, I think its called project M, like in reference to MilkDrop.. like the Winamp Milkdrop. I opened it, played something on spotify, and let my eyes go blind

Finished my regex validator. But now the edgy stuff kept coming. It seems that you can do a-d or 3-8. OK, makes sense (else it would be just copies of \w and \d), but anyone ever saw someone using it? I only knew a-z and 0-9.

Thing is, I wrote the perfect design now for the interpreter. Adding features is easy now and not so exciting.

Still, I have a big plan for it that makes it possible to validate nests like (()) or {{"}"}} or anything you see as start / close tag while keeping regex generic. I'm not learning it that signs between some chars ("') has special rules. That would be specialization.

Fun fact: my regex is six times slower than native C code (not c regex) validating the same. In half of test cases faster than c regex. I consider it a success.

Thanks for listening

Where do I start...

I have seen a QA load local code to a machine, run it and then say it was ready to deploy. Little did we know she wasn’t following the deployment process at all and didn’t even realize she had to. We were a week trying to figure out why the deploys wouldn’t work until she spoke up.

I knew a dev/founder that said to me “source control is only for large projects”, I tried to convince him and his cofounder to use github or bitbucket. Nope, they weren’t into it (fresh out of school listening to professors who hadn’t worked a development day in 20 years) One cofounder got disgruntled, thought he was doing most of the work and decided to quit, he also decided to wipe the code off his co-founders machine. I literally saw a grown man come out of a meeting crying knowing he would never gain back the respect of those mentors and advisors.

I once saw a developer create a printed ticket receipt for a web app. Instead of making a page and styling it to fit a smaller width, he decided to do everything in string literals. More precisely, he made one big long fucking strong literal and then broke it up using custom regex to add styling to different sections. We had a meeting and he was totally convinced this was the only way. In the end we scrapped the entire code and the dude didn’t last very long after that.

Worst of all! I once saw a developer find a IBM Model M keyboard and said “I’m gonna throw out this junky keyboard”. I told him to shut his stupid fucking mouth and give the the keyboard.

He did

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

To all websites requiring at least one upper case, one lower case, one number, one special character, 25 emoji and 49 unicorns in the password when signing up.

If you say something is required, then your regex BETTER be checking ONLY for those things. You should not have hidden requirements for passwords that users are supposed to dream about and know. Especially if it's a super time-sensitive thing that they should have opened 2 Fridays ago.

I had to pull my hair out for 20 minutes (that felt like an hour) before looking at their code and reading their regex. The regex was different from what the page said the requirements actually were. What were they even thinking? 😑

The rest of everything related to this organization uses an SSO system, why can't they just use it? Isn't the whole point of SSO to avoid a different login for every tiny part of the system?

I wonder what the other less technically inclined people using the system are doing right now. Sadly, I have no way of letting them know.

I sincerely hope the dev that made that website faces the same thing while picking a password for creating an account somewhere else and realizes what he/she did.

I really needed to let it out.
I feel much better now.

Time to take out the stress ball :)

Today I‘ve been investigating a freeze in our app. It took me many hours to narrow it down to the textfield validation regex. And it turned out to be a "catastrophic backtracking" issue.
I‘m a regex noob so I don‘t have a clue how it occurs exactly. But I‘m a bit perplexed about what a seemingly innocent regex can cause.

For me it became another argument against regex now.
I‘ve rewritten the regex into readable code and the freeze is gone.

I could try to fix the regex but… nah. The code is better anyway.

Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
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Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...

I built a view engine that relied on V8 for expression evaluation and flow. Not very stable of course, since it used RegEx, but it worked fine for what it was designed for.
The crown feature was the ability to pass in lazy-evaluated huge objects to that view model, so that the view model decided what was going to be used in order to display the view. Made it really flexible, while not sacrificing speed.

I was brainstorming for 2 days about the lazy loading part, and the gymnastics that had to be implemented for this to work.

After I wrote my final line of code and thought that this is it, I launched it, and it FUCKING WORKED! First try!
I was hyperventilating, walking around the apartment like crazy, doing random push-ups just to try to utilize some energy that I felt was fighting to burst out like a xenomorph out of the chest.

... 2 weeks later I found bugs. Had to re-learn how I did it. It's true what they say: if it was hard to write, it's even harder to debug. Fixed it eventually, but that part's not that exciting.

So I see posts about an interview question/challenge of inverting a binary tree. I don't use trees very often (mainly file related or parsing server nodes), but I thought I would learn how to do this.

I saw a page that started talking about different ways to invert enough to understand that one type of inversion is swapping left and right nodes. So I stopped before they showed how.

Then I created a test program that has a tree structure and also can display a tree before and after modification. This was kind of fun.

So then I wrote the inversion function. It was less than 10 lines of code. Wtf? I thought it would be harder than this.

Then I started wondering where trees were used. So today I have been learning how they are used and why I might need one to solve a problem. One use I intuited was parsing regex or a language. Apparently it is useful there.

What I am learning is that a lot of these interview questions are really test to see if you can comprehend instructions when stressed. Or you will ask questions to clarify the task. It doesn't necessarily test your ability to solve hard problems.

One thing that perplexes me. If inverting a tree is swapping nodes left<->right, then why not leave data in place and just swap roles in the functions. Maybe I completely misunderstood what inversion means or why it would be done. I guess if this is not inverting I have the structure to try other methods now.

listen to some music + regex/code golfing + notpron-like riddles

Nothing like trying to understand a single 1500-line source file that implements the API usage in the frontend. Without a single comment.
No, wait. There are comments! But it's only commented-out code. Or explicit shit (like "gets the version" before a getAssetVersion function).

Functions with unused parameters? ✅
Weird var names (like "tmpX")? ✅
`console.log(var)` everywhere? ✅
Long-ass lines with 150+ chars? ✅
Duplicate code? ✅✅
Not a single interface was used so everything is var: any? ✅
Random unreadable RegEx? ✅
If-chains of 6+ more levels? ✅
Many `else if` towers instead of a switch? ✅
And did I mention it was written by a fucker who can't speak proper English so shit like visiable, cataloge and isExist is everywhere? Yeah.

Fun day at the office reading spaghetti code 🙃

context: Python Sanic Backend, Bulma Frontend
*this is a direct repost of my rant on my discord*

UGH WHY IS EVERYTHING TOO COMPLICATED FOR NO FUCKING REASON
I JUST NEED AN INTERACTIVE UI WITHOUT EXPLICITLY DOING IT MYSELF WITH TONS OF BOILERPLATE CODE
React - uses JSX
Angular - uses TypeScript

what's next? some weird fucking thing that's not even necessary for basic needs
And why the fuck does react need node.js or some JSX compiler to make things easier?
None of this makes any fucking sense
Why not just declare actual javascript objects and functions and that's fuckin it
I just need regex validation and sometimes, custom validation based on other things
Then when the user changes something a small modal shows up asking to save changes
None of this bullshit
It's deadass simple
I don't need routing
No need for your JSX fuckery
No need for your TypeScript shit
I barely would even fucking use those
REEE
Fuck react, Fuck angular
React would've been the perfect thing for this shit
but NO
they had to make things 100x worse
Fucking bitch
because react has event hooks
I can just listen to the changes
then display the modal and get done with it
All other processing is done in the backend
IT'S THAT SIMPLE REACT
Validation is provided by the backend, Just fucking use regex in the frontend and that's it
IT JUST NEEDS TO DO SIMPLE THINGS
IT DOESN'T TAKE ROCKET SCIENCE TO DO MINIMAL WORK

Used the java replace method to remove specific characters with a regex. Wondered, why the characters weren't replaced until I realized I forgot that replace doesn't use regex but matches literally. Checked my previous code snippets, whether I made that mistake previously ... nope, I used replaceAll. 🤦

Sometime I wonder if the regex is just used is valid javascript code.

Is regex code a 100% way of validating e-mail address?

The fact that i no longer have to bother knowing or googling about generic java classes, lambda expression, regex, SQL syntax etc, and just ask ChatGPT to show me a code example of it - blows my fucking brain off

Currently the only 3rd party tokenization VSCode supports is a massive pile of RegEx. There's a whole discussion about how procedural tokenization could be supported without running extension code in the UI thread. The central argument against delegating this to an external worker is that if the reply doesn't arrive fast enough it might interfere with characters typed later.

1. Any computer that can run VSCode can execute somewhere in the order of a _billion_ instructions per second. To a program, the delay between keystrokes is an eternity. The only way to run out of time here is if either the dev isn't aware that the request is time sensitive, or the framework communicates to the OS that the task isn't urgent and an arbitrary amount of work is scheduled before it.

2. Chromium is the pinnacle of cybersecurity and its primary job is to sandbox untrusted user code. You don't need another thread to do it.

3. This use case fits squarely in the original design objectives of Webassembly.

*looks drowsy* Ugh my head..

You know what, guys? If you can freshly and directly remember how to do this:

- calculate the time complexity for each type of loop and code structure

- knowing how to write the following regex:
"A 15-digit number starting with a possibility of a group of 1-2 digit numbers, segregated into three 5-digit numbers tuples with three different separator characters, evaluated ahead"

- mentally work out how to reverse an array's indexes (swapping algorithm) without writing anything down

- know how to optimize a binary search in your head

then kudos to you. lmao
I'm rusty. It took me a while..

That feeling when you inherit a script to automate something that takes 10 seconds. Why would they even write this? It's not like the task is hard....

...

And why would they write it this way? I'm sure if I just move this part and ....

That feeling when you spend several hours improving and redesigning a perfectly functional script to automate a 10 second task for zero gain aside from cleaner code. "But the code for this quick-and-dirty script I'm never going to look at again looks so much better now!"

... If only it did a bunch of complicated parsing, regex matching, and error checking just so I can answer one less prompt.... Unless that parsing fails. Then it should still ask me for that prompt... And also validate that the answers I give are valid and correct....

That feeling when you spend a whole nother day starting from scratch to implement error checking and complex parsing logic knowing full well the original task takes 10 seconds to do manually and is needed at most twice a day (for a grand total of 20s a day)

WHY AM I LIKE THIS?!?!?!

Okay, I'm learning XSD (I wish i didn't, but yeah)

Why the fuck does it require so much code to use the simplest regex?

<xsd:simpleType>
<xsd:restriction base="xsd:integer">
<xsd:pattern value="([0-9])*" />
</xsd:restriction>
</xsd:simpleType>

Not really most painful, but definitely most painful of the recent bunch..
// yup, a bunch.. I've managed to fuck up a little on every thing I did that day :/ little friday the 13th for me, especially as I went on sick leave the next day and had to fixup my fuckups with a friggin migrane..

Anyways, I was fixing fallback to some default value in plsql.. before it didn't check what the input format was and simply relied on certain format, parsed that and converted to number..threw an error, duh!

I fixed it somehow elegantly to check with regex if the format is as expected and if not default to xy value..and if format is as expected to parse out the number..except that when I copied (or typed?! for the sake of me, I cannot recall how the fuck I managed to fuck this up) over the code to the package I didn't see additional [ at the begining, so everything went to the default.. Most embarrassing part is I commented everything, how it should work, use cases, what the input was and what was expected output..and failed to see the friggin extra [..
It was fixed easily, the extra [ stood out later when I saw the code, but it bothers me how I managed to overlook that in the first place. I think I need a vacation.. but have to fix other fuckups first.. :/

senior: it should only take 30 seconds to replace multiple display strings across our code base

well it would be nice if they'd do it then, and somehow i don't think that 30 seconds included checking your work and making sure you don't fuck up other instances of those strings (e.g. in variable names, etc)

maybe you got a clever enough regex to only hit exactly what you want :shrug:

My testing team just asked me for documentation for a screen a webapp. I had to make a small change in it which was regex and had to allow another char, which was quick fix. The code has single letter variables and huge java code in jsps,

How can i even find a documentation for it.