Yesterday was Friday the 13th, so here is a list of my worst dev nightmares without order of significance:

1) Dealing with multithreaded code, especially on Android

2) Javascript callback hell

3) Dependency hell, especially in Python

4) Segfaults

5) Memory Leaks

6) git conflicts

7) Crazy regexes and string manipulations

8) css. Fuck css.

9) not knowing jack shit about something but expected by others to
produce a result with it.

10) 3+ hours of debugging with no success

Post yours

Alright, I just wanna start off by saying that I'm a huge privacy guy. I hate all kinds of data collection companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon and all that. Yet I'm forced to have a Google account for certain reasons.

But the thing that I want to say is that I often talk to people to express my concerns about privacy. And most people agree and say that "yeah sure that's some scary shit" but don't actually do much about it.

And the thing is. If you just browse through all of the options in your Google account. You can turn off and remove almost all data collection/ad serving and identification options entirely.

And yet purple complain about that Google sees what you buy and shit. Turn everything off. Get and adblocker and get noscript. The single best browser add-on out there. It's almost that easy to get at least acceptable amounts of Internet privacy.

Please, don't ever ignore the significance of in Internet privacy. And the potential issue of net neutrality. Don't be ignorant. Don't be the client.

I hate when manager wants an Android app supportable all the way to GinerBread .FUCK YOU ASSHOLE how about I tell you to work 24/7 .PM Shitholes doesn't know shit about coding and make some unrealistic promises and when things don't work this bastards are all over your ass and want you to fix things . How about asking a developer before making such unrealistic promises . Let me tell you PM are the most useless kind of people's in the world who has failed to prove their significance in the company. Fuck you....PMs

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

More adventures of working with data scientists:

Doing combinatorial analysis.

One of the post processing scripts throws away combinatorial information, analyses significance of individual data points instead.

Code was so complicated, nobody noticed.

Really weird writing a book and being one of the only 2 people to know the entire story line...

Even more so when you wrote something down and knowing it's significance to the bigger picture makes you tear up a little... Fucking weird man...

ah this fucking sucks my boss, who is also the guy developing back end for our mobile app which im developing, isnt working on the back end makes me guess the fucking json strings that hes going to send and buils the front end, then later changes the fucking json structure completely and expects my app to work without any problems, how do you teach these fucking php developers the importance and significance of data types and data structures

I don't understand how my managers suddenly forgot that my "down weeks" we're due to technical debt I inherited. The whole on boarding hasn't been in my favor. I've stayed at work everyday til long after work hours, digging through code, trying to get JIRA tickets done, encountering issues specific to our code base that no one would ever discover on their own without docs/help from the original dev. The whole time, I was told that they know what's going on and apologize. I constantly expressed that plenty of what we were doing was building on antipatterns. They acknowledged. When a ticket wasn't done, they always knew the very specific reason and I wasn't faulted. 6 months in, I receive a great annual review. 7 months in? I receive an email titled "Performance Discussion," detailing 4 of those incidents where a ticket was pushed back -- with inaccurate depictions of what actually went down. They actually wrote that I didn't communicate. One part of the report expressed that there were "bugs found in production due to inadequate test coverage." WTF!! Everything made it past code review and QA. What are you talking about?? In fact, the person who wrote that merged my code in each time!!!! Insane!! Anyway, Q2 is partly about cleaning up technical debt, which is a responsibility I have been vested (fantastic). I've deleted about 800 lines of code in the last 2 weeks and added plenty of doc strings. Two of the most important modules our application works from are about 1000 lines of JavaScript each without any comments/docs. I'm changing that, but I don't know if my managers truly know the significance. Someone was recently promoted to my position but manually wrote out a sorting algorithm (specified numeric indexes and all); didn't do shit to earn it but breathe. And while they get more and more praise and responsibility, I'm over here stuck trying to prove myself and live up to why I assume they hired me. It's ridiculous. I love the company, but I'm not getting any sleep and I'm stressed out. It's only been about 7 months and I've been doing everything I can. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? I've been developing a recurring (physical) headache and ticks. My heart/chest area sometimes feels like it's lifting weights. I sound like an idiot, pushing so hard for a company that isn't mine, but I take so much pride in being in this position, and I'm so set on proving myself this early in my career (I'm 25).

It's May 4th and no one in my office knows the significance of today.

[vent]
I am java dev with 5 yoe at a place which has really good engineering talent.
Was assigned a feature request.
Feature request requires me and one more older dev(in age, not in exp at company) to write the code. My piece is really super complex because of the nature of the problem and involves caching, lazy loading and tonne of other optimization. Naturally it makes up 90% of the tasks in the feature request. On the other hand, the older dev simply has to write a select query (infact he only needs to call it since a function is already written).
Older dev takes up all the credit, gives the demo, knows nothing but wrongly answers in meetings with higher ups and was recently awarded employee of qtr.
It looks as if I do the easy work whereas he is the one pulling in all the hard work.
Need advice to justify my work and make others realise it's significance, nuances of area and complexity of it.
Do not expect monetary benefits, just expect credit and recognition for the worth of work I am doing.

Some people have interesting, cool or exciting lives and I know u are fascinated by them... U may even fall in love . but do remember that u r an insignificant troll who is good at doing one complicated job and whose significance cannot be comprehended, appreciated or understood by the said fascinating people. So go back to your cave do the shit u usually do coz u have a deadline to meet.
-the voice inside my head

This is gonna get someone illogically upset, but idc about that.

I know it's ignorance of semantics but I'm tired of propagated ignorance changing the meaning of things.

Non-binary is NOT a legitimate term for whatever 'gender' you are!

I get what *whoever-started-it* was going for, but it's NOT valid. If you want to say that youre not male or female, fine... just don't abuse binary systems to do it. Just say youre non-bool/anti-boolean or identify with one of the, apparently 50, shades of gray.

I keep getting into logical loops to nowhere about this nonsense. No one is even defining what's supposed to be the 1 vs the 0. Which then makes me think '1 must be male... genitalia=1 in many ways...' which then sources back to the historic validity of males vs undervalued/less than human interpretations of females...

Then <brake>.
Ofc these people aren't going into the historical significance... they don't even realise how binary works! Ofc they'd have no clue that all 0s= no data... and 0s only have significance when viewed in placement to the 1s.

Let's all start using proper terminologies, like non-boolean. Maybe i can start a trend by paying people pennies to learn/teach wtf a boolean value is, and that binary can represent anything. With proper encoding the array is limitless... so being binary is actually a giant spectrum... therefore makes no sense to be "non-binary".

Ok... im done. It had to be said.

Who wants to start identifying as non, or educating wtf is, boolean with me???

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

It's hard for me sometimes to tell the difference between a dev who actually got fucked and a dev who just didn't know how to budget their time correctly...

I've had freelance web friends who will go out partying twice a week... I've also had freelance web friends who shutter themselves indoors the moment a project of significance comes up. Both types have complained to me about crunch time.

Obviously i can't tell a whole story from just a devRant thread, but for a select few of them i really feel like this person just had no idea what they were doing, were negligent, or estimated their time way under the cut.

I'm not calling anyone out, I'm just saying that when you post about crunch when the item is something fairly obvious you should've been able to catch within the first week of the project, it makes me doubt your sensibilities.

Obviously I'm not making any judgements or saying that i know even half of what you know about the project and the job, but I'm just saying a little more detail couldnt hurt...

ok, fuck people. i mean the people who talk about things that are a big deal. you don't need to take a course in html/css to build a website, you need documentation.

people act like programming languages are a whole separate literacy. they're not. it is not a big deal, nor an accomplishment of any significance, to learn any language to a basic extent. variables, control flow, functions and scope should not be considered challenging topics, and people should stop bragging about them. i'm pretty sure this is because programming is new. as people, i think when something is new we tend to think of it as more complex and harder to understand. basic programming is not that.

ok that was a tangent from my real point. college is a scam. anyone can learn anything from books and the internet. any time you want to learn about something, go to google, and search "${my topic} site:*.github.io" and you'll have a page about that topic written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate of the topic. colleges don't teach people how to think like these books/websites do. and i'm fucking sick of people who'd rather see a degree then a portfolio. fuck them shits bro. i can distinct my smart friends because my smart friends speak logically and enjoy becoming smarter. i would take the kid who watches aerodynamics videos on youtube and then built a plane over a kid who studied and got a five on his ap physics exam. watching then doing is better learning than watching and repeating. after all, creativity is not at all measured in our grades, and i'd like to argue that sometimes intelligence isn't even measured. i mean, people can say they're good at math, but the kids who talk about fibinnoci numbers and why there can never be two primes more than 7 (i if i remember properly) integers apart or the ones who prove cryptographic algorithms. i guess what i'm trying to say is the dumb kids aren't dumb and the smart kids aren't smart (well not that) but kids who are passionate and just do something instead of waiting for their degree to do the same thing are the best and brightest. i forgot what i was talking about. sorry it is almost 2 am and i am intoxicated , and i don't believe i got my point across very well either.

Co-worker: "You don't need to know the math! Stop going on about it."

Me: "I think you do for some things, my algebra is not good at all, I need to improve it a lot and I just think you should too."

Co-worker: "Oh stop it, If the code runs it's OK!"

Me: "Well yeah, the code runs but you're over-fitting like a mad man and have a P-value of a bejillion."

Co-worker: "What!?"

"data scientist"

Every once in a while the flexibility of dynamic types comes back and bites you in the ars:

So I created method that returns the date significance (day, month, year) or null when no date is set.
I chose a class constant DAY with the value 0.
This is not a problem in if statements as I always use === but in this case a switch made more sense. And as you can guess no date set (NULL) was handled in the self::DAY (0) case... 😐😑😶 Silently resulting in wrong results when no date is given! #£#@$& (and other comic swearing symbols)

Even though php7 finally has decent type hinting resulting in much clearer defined API's we can still go very wrong.
More love to Go for less verbose static typing! To bad we can rarely use it at the office 😥

Batteries don't like me anymore

Yesterday late evening I was out to bring a festive parcel to someone. I left home with 29% batt, went there and still had 27%. Made 3 short (~1min) calls and headed home. Opened Firefox and my phone crashed. WTF, how could FF crash Android? OS separation failure? I turn my phone back on and it says LOW BATTERY: 0%. wtf... With 27% I should have been good until the next morning with no problems! And now it went 27%→0% in a blink (literally).

Today I decided to stay on my lappy for the morning. YT videos to catch up to, dR posts to scroll through, etc. A few hours later laptop battery is drained down to 29%. I step away for a few minutes for a cup of coffee and when I come back - the battery indicator LED is glowing amber and OS says it's got 6% left

29%→6% in a few moments of idle. Riigghhhhttt.... And I thought I won't want anything for this Christmas.

I wonder what's the significance of 27/29% there...

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

Why on Earth is React.Component.state public? This doesn't make any sense. It has no significance, but it just feels so, so stupid.

Thoughts on significance of Software Requirement Specification and Software Design Specification document in the industry?
Coming from a student struggling to understand the importance of it.

The (in)significance(!) of a not:

if (!IamRunningParallel()) {...} else {...}

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. " - Aristotle

"The Senior Developer told me I was wrong but I proved that he was in fact wrong." - Why are there so many rants like this? What's the significance of the "Senior" part? Are you just telling the world you are better than "Senior" or do you just want to put them down?

What significance does web development have?

After the Covid-19 virus outbreak, web development has positioned the business at the forefront of many well-known and expanding brands. Higher user interactions within international cross-platforms have been attained by compliant web development solutions. Significantly, the prospects for its expansion are good for articulating corporate and e-commerce projects.