Just reached 100+!!

Anyhow. I started coding prettymuch 365 days ago. My mate decided to launch his company and figured it was a good idea to start it with good friends who knew fuck all at coding.

Fyi, the dude can code 15 hours straight everyday for about a year (no shit thats what i saw).

Since he taught me html css javascript(even if i still suck abit at js). He made me remake the whole bootstrap in react by adding this new lib styled-components and test everything(95% coverage :)).

He also taught me webpack and rollup. Json schma forms，http requests redux， redux logic， and all the routing shit...he obliged me to i plement RR4 on release and is now making me overlook the merge requests of my other collegue (yes he made me a git pro，almost).

And now i have to work long distance by studying java， spring， oauth2 and start working on our api.

O yeah，and i went from microsoft to full on linux!!!

To be honest i thought i was gonna die this year. (Also have a kid on the way :)).

Devrant has been like going to the psychologist :) everytime shit hit the fan i realized every one has the same problems :)

Thanks to the community i can also now even give out nerd jokes :)

(L)Devrant

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

Swift, oh my god, why do you have to be like this?

I'm looking to write a simple for loop like this one in java

for(int i = 5; i > 0; i--) {
// do shit
}

Thats it, simple, go from 5 to 1 (inclusive), I saw that to iterate over a range in a for loop (increasing ordeR) I can do this

for i in 0...5 {
// do shit.
}

So I thought maybe I could do this to go in reverse (which seems logical when you think about it doesn't it?)

for i in 5..<0 {
// do shit
}

But no, this compiles FINE (THIS IS THE FUCKING KICKER IT COMPILES), alright, when you the code runs you get a fucking exception that crashes the mother fucking application, and you know what the problem is?? This dogshit, shitStain of a language doesn't like it when integer that the for loop starts with is larger than the integer that the for loop ends with MOTHERFUCKER ATLEAST TELL ME THAT AT COMPILE TIME AS A MOTHERFUCKING WARNING YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!

Alright *deep breathing*, now we can't just be stuck on this raging, we're developers need to move forward, so I google this, "Swift for loop in reverse" fair enough I get a straight forward answer that tells me to use the `stride` functionality. The relevant code for it

for i in stride(from:5 to:1 by:-1) {
// do shit
}

Wow looks fine and simple right?? (looks like god damn any other language if you ask me, no innovations here piece of shit apple!) WRONG BITCHES !!! In the latest version of Swift THE FUCKING DEVELOPERS DECIDED TO REMOVE STRIDE ALTOGETHER, WITHOUT ADDING IN A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR THAT SHIT!

Alright NOW IM FUCKING MAD, I got rage on stackoverflow chat, a guy who's been working on ios for quite a while comes up n says and I quote
"I can sort of figure it out, but besides that, iterating in reverse is uncommon enough that it probably hasn't crossed anyone's mind."

Now hope you guys understand my frustration, and send me cookies to calm me down.

Thank you for listening to me !

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

When you write code straight for 2 hours and it instantly works 😊

Fucking fuck fuck fucker fucking fuck

What a dumbass guy seriously. I have this colleague in my office who refuses to create a new branch because that will "ruin the single straight line". Are you seriously fucking kidding me??? The noobest guy ever doesnt know a third git command other than pulling and committing fucking nonsense. Why use git then? Just go back to creating zip files are maintain code. Fuck that guy too who hired him and now because of this fucking asshole I am not able to carry on my work.

Such so-called "developers" should be strapped to the back of a horse and the horse made to run on a gravel road for fuck's sake.. Fuck you man 🖕

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)

Long story:

*I add first unit tests to project.

*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.

*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.

Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"

Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".

Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."

Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"

Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"

Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"

Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"

Me: "then why add any tests?"

Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"

*Boss storms out

I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.

That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.

My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.

We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.

I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.

Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.

10-1 AM - 4 of us got drunk.
2-4 AM - 2 hours straight coding, solving big-ass problems
10 AM - Fucking hangover and python code in a java project!

I spent about 5 hours today coding and I was totally in the zone. I'm talking things were working properly, tests were passing, bugs were being squashed all over the place. It was completely amazing, I felt like a god ruling over my code kingdom.

After about 5 straight hours I realized that I needed food so I got up, stretched my legs and had some dinner. Well I sat back down about an hour ago and I am SO far out of the zone. Everything is breaking, I can't focus and I have no idea why. My kingdom was overrun with a plague of bugs in just the short time I paused to eat.

Moral of the story: when you get in the zone don't stop for anything even if it seems like basic human necessity. After all we aren't human when we're in the zone, we are coding gods.

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.

Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”

Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”

God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Just coded for ~14h straight. Started doing some super heavy code cleanup and refactoring. Almost cried when I saw my code from the past.

Maybe it's time to call it a day...

Reviewing coworker's code:

Me: I see you're doing a convoluted sort for every element twice to get your two lists in sync... 😐
CoWorker: Yeah. *straight face, no regrets* That's the only way to do this.
Me:... Uh... No? You can just manage one list with a simple struct and then use the the standard sort.
Coworker: Yeah sure I know. But it'll take time. We don't have time.
Me: *aghast* This is embarrassingly bad code!
Coworker: Don't worry, later on I'll use a hashmap for it. But this needs to be pushed now.
Me: *to myself, no you don't need a hashmap*
Okay, you do you but I can't back you on this. It isn't going to take a lot of time to correct it.

Next day.
Coworker: Hey can you review my code again?
Me: You've made the changes already? *in a bored tone, knowing that they wouldn't have changed shit*
Coworker: No this is a different file. Our manager agrees that we can worry about performance later.
Me: Sure. *😀🔨🔨*

Few weeks pass by:
QA: The operation takes absurdly long time to complete even with the smallest data. Ten minutes for X is unacceptable.
Me: Who would've known? ☺️

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

I'm not really one for news, but apparently (a while ago) there was some 12 year old who taught himself to code and made his own apps and whatnot. Girlfriend informed me of this.

Just got told that I'm a useless piece of shit because Im 23 and don't develop apps and I'm not rich like this kid. Fuck man. I develop mostly server side software, and I personally fucking wrote half the shit the company uses. No one really knows, so naturally in the silent developer. Don't much care about that. But fuck, being told I'm useless because a 12 year old has more money than me really made me take one straight to the balls. Now I'm sitting here, moping, downloading android studio, and just going to prove a person wrong. I can fucking code an app, it's not that hard.

Should have just said fuck off, but I don't have the strength and effort to face flying cups anymore.

Android sdk, here I come.

I wish i could code for 8 hours straight instead of getting interrupted every 20mins. That would be the life

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

One team was delivering for 12 months.

... but definition of done not met. Code crap everywhere. Tests barely there and are total mess.

I inherited mess after previous lead engineer.

I exposed all the issues to the management in a straight way, no sugar coating.

... and now guess who's the bad guy for "complaining" instead of shut up and "making it work"?

P.s.
"Giving accurate report about situation" is seen as "complaining".

My boss is a grumpy 25 year oldish "Mr. I know it all". We all hate him for that attitude.
Just joining recently, the code base which I got introduced to was totally new and I was overwhelmed.
Boss told me to write an Sql query to wipe the table data. I being reckless wrote a query to wipe the table only and submitted it to my boss.
Few hourse later we were informed by our peers that a certain url was not working. On further investigating we found out that my boss carelessly copy and pasted my query and executed it which wiped an important table clean.
Now he doesn't talk to me straight and I can't look him in the eye because obviously I burst into laughter.
Job well done☺️

So yesterday one of the "senior" python developers woke me up at 1 am (we work in different time zones, and he knows how many hours I'm ahead) asking why isn't his code working. The error message was:

[ERROR] Runtime.ImportModuleError: Unable to import module 'app': xxx is not installed, run `pip install xxx` Traceback (most recent call last)

I am at lose of words and patience. Not only idiots who can't google simple stuff are seniors, additionaly we went from "DevOps is a culture" straight to "hey I'm developer in my silo, if it doesn't work on my machine it's DevOps problem, plz fix".

Worst experience with cs profs? Oh boy....

Databases lab: "You'll need to work of this snippet, if your IDE tells you it's deprecated you don't need to care about it"
If you want to imagine the quality of the code base we were expected to work upon just think about that attached xkcd comic, basically an undecipherable black box.

The instructions where at the same time micro managing everything (he gave us frickin variable names to use, and no good ones, no the database connection had to be called datbc, yeah very descriptive) and yet so obfuscated that I'm not completely sure he didn't resurrect Kant himself to ghostwrite for him.

He also didn't like us to use any Java feature that was to 'modern', for example for each loops since "they offer no benefit over normal for loops".

Further, everything we wrote had to be documented with a relationship diagram and a uml. So far no problem if he hadn't invented his own flavor of both (which can be read about in his book).
Oh, and he almost failed me because I used a lambda expression in his 'code on paper' exam and this "arrows are a C command" I "must have been confused"... which is glorious coming from the guy who can't get operators and commands straight.

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

Any code I make for clients is under a strict license unless specified otherwise. It's a straight forward license pretty much stating that they can't sell it or claim it as their own. I've had a few clients break that license but one stood out. I had made a piece of software that cost her over $2,500 due to the amount of hours that went into it. The transaction went along smoothly so there was nothing to be alarmed about. She came back for more work about 6 months later and I decided to do some checking up on her to see how her business was going. Immediately smack bang on the home page was my software being sold for $30/month. Needless to say I was outraged. She said there was no talk of a license which I responded with pulling out the contract that she signed where it explained that signing the contract meant she was in agreement with the specified license. 2 months after this started, I'm being awarded any profits made from said software along with her closing down the website. As much of a bitch as she was, it wasn't worth my time trying to get more out of her.

A repressed memory just popped into my head:

At my former job I tried to explain a problem I was having to the tech lead. Then, without fully understanding the problem, he decided to rewrite my code that I had been working on for weeks. His code, that took him 2 days to write, went straight to master without peer review.

He introduced about 10 regressions…

Queue the client meeting where the client says “These bugs came back, and we thought they were fixed already…” (They demo the bugs)

So obviously I say “I’ll let Techlead address that one.”

He just mumbles some stuff, and goes quiet for the rest of the meeting. Finally, when the meeting was wrapping up we hear “It’s Fixed!”

Everyone was like ???

“That bug from earlier, it’s fixed, it should work now….”

Would you believe this guy decided to code during the entire meeting, clearly missing important feedback and information that would help him understand the problem. Again, pushing to master without review….

Not to mention that we were talking about 10 regressions…

1. No more coding on paper! Why can some already write essays on laptops but programmers are stuck with "analog"?
2. No vendor lock-ins! Teach free, cross-platform development, not VB.NET.
3. No more professors stuck in the eighties! If all you know is 6800 assembly, GTFO. I heard NASA was hiring...
4. Enforce code style consistency, proper documentation and even VCS for larger projects
5. Algorithms -> scripting -> programming. Don't quickly explain the basics, then throw students straight into Java.

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

Recovering a legacy Gmail account after receiving a notice of a blocked login.

*Tries to remember the bloody password*
*Actually remembers it*

> Sorry your password isn't enough. Your father's phone number that you used a decade ago can be used for verification though!

Google, let's get this straight. Things have changed. I know the fucking phone number and yes I can enter it, and out of sheer stupidity I did send an authentication code his way. Unfortunately however, things have changed in 10 years. I can instantly kill the fucker on the spot if I were to meet him ever again. Do you think that I'm going to get that fucking code?!

> Oh but you can try to email the code to the very account that you're trying to recover, despite the fact that you know the password for it.

TO THE FUCKING SAME ACCOUNT THAT I'M RECOVERING.

Must've taken a true genius to code that in!!!

Tonight is the strangest night ever. I was coding for 2hours straight then I ran the code later and it worked fine.😰

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

That moment you realise why you enjoy the dev life again.

It's been a long time since I've had a solid day of coding, just coding..., no meetings, no wild requests, no crazy issues, no data fixing because someone can't type a number correctly, just me, myself and that keyboard going on a field trip of quality coding time again.

Ah, it's a good day to end the week on!

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

My Perfect Day : Assumption

Woke up at 6. Went for morning walk or do yoga or some sort of stuff.

Came back at 7. Went for daily routine, like bathing and all.

Went to prepare breakfast at 7:45. Prepared some eggs and bread and coffee.

It is 8:15 now. Reading news papers or watching tv and doing breakfast.

At 9 check mails and prepare some stuff.

At 9: 30 went for office. Reached office 5 minute before 10, safe and sound.

Came back at 7 by evening. Did some rest. Prepare dine till 9. Take a bath. Complete the dine.

At 10:30 ready to sleep.

Actual Scenario :

Woke up at 8:30. No time for yoga or morning walk. No time for preparing breakfast as well. Went straight to bathroom. Came back in 20 minutes. Made a cup of coffee. No time for newspaper or tv.

Feeling lazy and tired already. At 9:10 went for office. Before reaching office stopped at fast food joints. buy some junk food. Eat them. Got traffic jam and reached office late.

Started working but feeling lazy. Boss asked twice about the project status and i am unable to think a single line of code.

However, days passed. Boss scolded me. I promised him to finish the work after reaching home.

Reached home at 7:30. Late for no reason. Went straight to bed. Sleeps a hour. But took 20 minutes to leave bed.

Started working on projects i did not complete in the office.

Time fly and it is already 1 in morning. No dinner. Tired as fuck but hungry as well. So made some eggs and eat. Wrapped the task but it is 3:30 in morning and i jumped to bed for sleep.

Loop.

Oh boy, my riskiest coding decision was certainly that one time when I refactored some 50k lines of critical legacy shit code in 3 days, straight up merged everything into master and then deployed to prod.
Luckily there was only one minor bug I had to fix after that... phew...
(To my defense: I was solo-working on it - the infamous CMS Of Doom™)

My brain is melting.

6 hours straight of just Refactoring without a break.

Technical debt is real, it is a bitch, and so are clients to expect to 'see' changes every week.

Boss tells me we need to balance doing work on things the client can play with and the backend code that does it all... 😧ok....

'TODO: remove sample return and connect to backen' As far as the eye can see.

Karma...you're the best.

An ex-team member was complaining to me about his manager reviewing his code. Shortened version of the convo:
Mgr: "Why didn't you use the new C# built-in extension methods?"
Dev: "No reason. I thought using the straight forward approach would be easier to maintain"

Ha!..you conceded, arrogant mother <bleep>er. How many times did I have to listen you berate other developers in code reviews for not using some random C# syntax sugar? Comments like "If you bothered to read the new C# 7.0 language specification like I did...you would have known not to use the string.Format anymore..."

Now you're pissed that the manager embarrassed you? How does it feel d-bag?

That's too evil...so I simply responded "I don't think Nick meant anything negative about your code, he's just trying to help."

Seeing him stir around all pissed off does make me giggle like a little schoolgirl.

!rant

Yesterday I got a pretty straight-forward task of fixing SASS linting errors from our project. I thought, "How many errors could there be?" Turns out there were just around 2000 errors across 109 files!

I was almost like, "Man, this is going to take a lot of my time!"

So, I started fixing the errors one-by-one with my headphones on and switching music genres after every 2 hours.

After almost 6 hours of continuous bug-fixing, my mind kind of became repellant to the possibility of the outer world and my fingers automatically fell on the right keys in almost no time. My brain was functioning like a computer itself.

And after the end of 7 hours, I reduced the number to less than 1000 errors.

Today, I continued the task and found out that there were some scoping errors I made yesterday (web developers would know this pain of '&').

And after working for almost 6 hours today, I got the number down to 500.

Not a rant, but I felt extremely content with what I did today.

I guess every day is not just about programming, sometimes, it's also about making your code better.

Thanks for reading! :)

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

This goddemn telephone keeps on ringing like I will never have peace of mind ever! I couldn't even write 10 lines of code straight. 😤

Some young kid taking his first steps into compsci was being straight-up fucking harassed on SO. No one answered, instead users with really high rep just said shit like "if you tried to hang yourself with that code it'd come apart but you should check anyway" in the comments. I flagged the comments and got fucking banned from the entire Stack Exchange network. I created a new account to help the kid, posted an answer, and was banned and had my answer removed within 5 minutes.

SE can burn in hell.

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Staring at cursed blinking cursors.
Repairing work of worst thinking workers
Reverse merges or it'll murder the servers, it nurtures despair
Amateur managers, dimwitted savages interrupt all of us janitors
Cleaning up damages, spills and experiments using skills in embarrassment
Explicit foulness, in a minute it's straight to the bowels with weapons of limitless vowels
A bittersweet hateful machete, eviscerates stateful spaghetti
The slow disease flowing from keys knowing it's going to please
The growing unease, no one agrees, there's no guarantees with your useless degrees
Need more drugs, keyboard's crawling with bugs, falling as I chug
A bottle of cognac gotta love all the hacks, no poise for code that lacks
All the noise, gotta relax, before I destroy the syntax.

Excuse me for not making sense.
Too gloomy, aching and tense.

I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.

Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.

However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.

The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.

I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.

Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.

What a fucking asshole.

So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.

Okay so this is just a rant about my personal life because if I post it any where else no one will really care.

So I graduated from a vocational high school where I learned about basic IT and networking skills but I mostly focused on my programming. and I LOVED that school honestly the environment was so amazing and everyone and everything about it was amazing. then I started college recently hoping for the same thing and its just depressing me, and my depression is coming back and I cant stop it because I cant distract myself from it. My friends are always off playing Monster Hunter Ultimate and Im just wishing theyd hop back on Warframe so we can play again.. They say they will but they really wont so im usually just playing alone or going online which is sometimes fun if you have people that talk back.

so i took myself to the official warframe discord to find people that would help but everytime I ask I just get ignored. So Im stuck playing alone.

while thats happening Im not really getting any messages from anyone besides my girlfriend which is nice but she isnt able to really keep up a conversation and shes often busy with school as well. when I try to talk to any of my friends they arent really interested to talk or just send short replies that obviously tell me to go away. one friend in particular she and I used to talk everyday not even in a romantic way just straight up besties for life, but after one of my relationships ended she basically took her side and never talks to me now. Ive just been really lonely and wanting to just have my friends talk to me again or just have some programming friends I can chill in a discord server while we code but I cant bring myself to ask anyone on the specific server im in for programming..

Honestly idk if anyone on devrant really looks at my posts and thinks "oh look Bubbles posted again". I feel like im not good enough to be here because Im not nearly as good as all of you, Im mostly just here asking questions or posting extremely fucking long posts no one wants to read. and yet this is still where most of my interactions are and I love that this devRant community makes me laugh or feel better about myself sometimes. and I thank all of you for that and I remember your @ 's all the time.

honestly the only real highlight of my week was when my teacher of my vocational class asked me to come back as an unpaid intern to help teach his new programming class and It made me happy but other than that I havent been too happy.

if anyone actually got through this holy shit youre awesome and thank you a lot its appreciated.

Bipolar disorder means that you can code for 14 hours straight, sleep for 4 hours and feel refreshed ready for another round. You can make art and you can express your thoughts in creative, kinda alien ways.

But here are tradeoffs that make bipolar disorder a disease:
- everyone around you is an enemy
- they’re all acting together to harm you
- nobody understands you
- they all make fun of you
- if I say what I mean, nobody will understand me. I’ll scare them
- I’m extremely aggressive towards everything: people, things, situations, problems. Computer lags so I scream, smash it, throw it out of the window and buy a new overpriced one
- constant uncertainty about whether am I acting right or not

Today’s achievement: my phone didn’t autocorrect ‘fucking’ to ‘ducking’.

Clearly it’s as pissed off as I am about receiving shitty emails from the other team manager in my dept giving me and my team work to do and throwing us under the bus when he does jack shit all day except read BBC news and go on Facebook. On the odd occasion he does actually do work, it’s not good work, it’s riddled with bugs because he’s ‘too senior to need a code peer review’. Such a fucktard...

Oh, and the work he’s asked us to do technically sits in his team so I’ll be firing that straight back at him 😁

I’m all for being a team player and helping each other but I’m going to protect my team over helping someone. The gloves are about to come off....

So this happened last week.

Last week I went as a volunteer to give an introduction class basic programming to some guys and gals who are going to attend computer science soon next year.

The class lasted one week and we had done some basic algorithms and programming in Python.
Besides that we also did some very basic websites (html, css and javascript).

Obviously all those people were very enthusiastic.
Some were a little bit too enthusiastic...

There were these 2 guys who were best friends. They already knew everything apparently. Even though they just finished high school they had been programming for over 10 years, had already made countless of websites, applications, 'hacked Windows', RATs and some amazing games.

So there were some people there who never had programmed before. I started giving the lecture and warned people who already knew some basics of programming the first day might be a quite boring but I could not simply skip it obviously.

Those 2 dickheads acted like the biggest childs ever, started screaming in class, making sure everyone knew they were bored, and were constantly complaining to me that they know what print, for, while and strings were. I stayed calm and tried to explain them again I simply couldn't skip parts of the lecture for them.

Every hour and every day it started getting worse and worse with them. Not only but the whole class were furiously mad at them. Some other students even started screaming at them. They screamed back insulting everyone they even didn't what php was and stupid stuff like that.

At some point they interrupted me AGAIN and asked me how long I programmed. I told him little them over 5 years or something. They started laughing at me. Those 2 dickheads looked at me like they were so much better than me because they programmed over 10 years.

At some point, almost the last day, I had enough of their bullshit, interruption, screaming, insulting other students who asked questions, ... I said you know what, you give the lecture!

They refused because they felt too good for all these other 'noobs' (the other students). They would never become good and blah blah more bullshit.

I said alright, we're doing websites, you've made some websites, show me your most impressive website.

He was happy and felt honered.

He sent me the whole folder and I showed his website on code on the big screen in the room.

Then I said: "Everyone, pay close attention to this!"

That dickhead smiled and felt good

Me: "This is how NOT to make a website"

I started explaining to everyone all things that were complete shit and all things that were straight up sins.

That one friend of the dickhead stayed quiet. The other dickhead became as red as a tomato. At some points you even saw tears in his eyes. At some point he insulted me I was a scriptie and simply left.

The class started clapping.

One of the weirdest but also best moments of my life

Moral: Don't act like a complete bigheaded dickhead, don't feel better than everyone and show some respect

Thank you for reading

Have a nice day!

As a trainee in my very first company I was comparing myself to my mentor too much.

And I just couldn't compete.

He had deep knowledge, was more productive, had amazing skills in different departments and his side projects were astonishing.

Turned out: I wasn't expected to.
Turned out: Even among nerds, he was an extraordinary unicorn. Other developers in the company had huge respect and were humbled by his skills.

Yet nevertheless, I doubted my career choice when I was struggeling for 4 hours on a seemingly tiny problem, then when I approached him he would come in and write the code down in 15 minutes.

He made it look so god damn easy.

Little did I know that the main difference between him and I was: experience.

He had much more of it. I still had to make some mistakes and he greatly helped me avoid some of them.

It really helped me that one day he talked to me and set my head straight that I wasn't expected to perform on the same level as him. He was getting a salary, I merely some peanuts, after all.

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. 

Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, "I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out." 

"Very well," says God, "let us see if Jesus has fared any better." 
Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. 

Satan is astonished. He stutters, "B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus' program is intact! How did he do it?" 

God chuckles, "Everybody knows... Jesus saves."

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

Copy-pasting code from StackOverflow and hoping that it works straight away

Had an awesome day at work got so much coding done, made an awesome well documented class for a Countdowntimer class in Android.

Was looking forward to getting home and using my motivation to continue coding my game when I got home.

Then get to the bus stop and it's packed for the Adele concert, I saw a poster okay thats good only buses are packed (I then take a train, I live pretty far from work) I get to the train station and the shittiest system has been setup,

Where people pack on the train that goes to the last stop south for the Adele concert that isn't even near the last stop!

One of the platforms aren't even being used and the trains that got partway south are tiny as hell for the rest of the people that don't want to go to this concert.

For one thing who thought it was a good idea to setup such a shitty system? Why not have one train go straight to the damn concert area and continually use that one platform and for the rest of the people have the trains running as normal?

Nope let's make a shitty system that doesn't work well.

Top it off have concerts on a Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Dumbasses.

Now I get to wait in town doing absolutely nothing and losing the little time I have to code on my game.

I fucking hate ppl who transferred from business program into the CS program. They are all talk and no action. Literally this girl who claim to be “good at algorithm” doesn’t even know how to write a quick sort. In the past 2 months I have received more request from business program students to “help debug program” than all of the other departments (science, engineering) combined. Worse, some just straight ask for my code so they can copy off my implementation.

Seriously, it’s okay if you don’t know how to do stuff. But it’s not okay if you don’t want to learn AND feel so fucking entitled. I have a lot of homework as well, it’s not my responsibility to **help** you.

It's my first 'rant' so be kind :P

When I started my studies a already knew some very basic programming stuff. I went to the exercises with another dude I met. We always joked about the tasks we had to do and did other things while the others tried to fix bugs in their code. After the semester ended he asked me whether I want to work part time at his mother's office. I went to the interview which was weird because I have never been to one before but got the job straight away. I'm in my fourth year of working there because the team is awesome.

Ok friends let's try to compile Flownet2 with Torch. It's made by NVIDIA themselves so there won't be any problem at all with dependencies right?????? /s

Let's use Deep Learning AMI with a K80 on AWS, totally updated and ready to go super great always works with everything else.

> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> CUDA versions overwrite
> Library paths not updated ever
> Torch 0.4.1 doesn't work so have to go back to Torch 0.4
> Flownet doesn't compile, get bunch of CUDA errors piece of shit code
> online forums have lots of questions and 0 answers
> Decide to skip straight to vid2vid
> More cuda errors
> Can't compile the fucking 2d kernel
> Through some act of God reinstalling cuda and CuDNN, manage to finally compile Flownet2
> Try running
> "Kernel image" error
> excusemewhatthefuck.jpg
> Try without a label map because fuck it the instructions and flags they gave are basically guaranteed not to work, it's fucking Nvidia amirite
> Enormous fucking CUDA error and Torch error, makes no sense, online no one agrees and 0 answers again
> Try again but this time on a clean machine
> Still no go
> Last resort, use the docker image they themselves provided of flownet
> Same fucking error
> While in the process of debugging, realize my training image set is also bound to have bad results because "directly concatenating" images together as they claim in the paper actually has horrible results, and the network doesn't accept 6 channel input no matter what, so the only way to get around this is to make 2 images (3 * 2 = 6 quick maths)
> Fix my training data, fuck Nvidia dude who gave me wrong info
> Try again
> Same fucking errors
> Doesn't give nay helpful information, just spits out a bunch of fucking memory addresses and long function names from the CUDA core
> Try reinstalling and then making a basic torch network, works perfectly fine
> FINALLY.png
> Setup vid2vid and flownet again
> SAME FUCKING ERROR

> Try to build the entire network in tensorflow
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> Doesn't work with TF
> HAVE TO FUCKING DOWNGEADE DRIVERS TOO
> TF doesn't support latest cuda because no one in the ML community can be bothered to support anything other than their own machine
> After setting up everything again, realize have no space left on 75gb machine
> Try torch again, hoping that the entire change will fix things

At this point I'll leave a space so you can try to guess what happened next before seeing the result.

Ready?

3

2

1

> SAME FUCKING ERROR

In conclusion, NVIDIA is a fucking piece of shit that can't make their own libraries compatible with themselves, and can't be fucked to write instructions that actually work.

If anyone has vid2vid working or has gotten around the kernel image error for AWS K80s please throw me a lifeline, in exchange you can have my soul or what little is left of it

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.

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

“Yes Haskell is my favorite language, so elegant yet so powerful, a pure form of expression of my complex thoughts”
*proceeds to code nothing but crappy hacky CRUDs in php5.4 for five years straight*

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

Can someone just please come over and safe me? I am soooooo done with all this bullshit code. I understand why people loathe PHP, it enables totally worthless people to carry the title 'programmer' because hurrrdurrr look at my website, I made this. Fuck yes, you made that and you should SHAME yourself! What the actual flying fuck I can't begin to explain the monstrosities that I find checking out this worthless pile of fucking garbage.

User passwords saved as plaintext in database? Check!

Using hungarian notation, camecase and snakecase inconsistently? Check!

Typejuggling like you're the mainman of the Insane Clown Posse? Check!

Everything is a mess, there is no documenation, no consistency no nothing, this is straight from the 9th circle of programmers hell.

Aaaaaaarghhhhh I AM SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS WORTHLESS PILE OF GARBAGE!!!!

The original dev prefixed every spagetthifile with his copyright shite so im gonna look him up and highfive him in the face with my laptop and after that printing out my resignation letter in comic sans fontsize 78 because FUCK YOU

So done.

For me, the worst co-worker is one who works by the principle of quantity over quality or a person who thinks quick and ugly fixes are a valid way to solve problems. Also: If there are unittest, don't fucking dare to change or remove them, just so your code runs without errors.

But in general, I just can't work with people who don't really think about what they are coding, people who just code straight ahead without making the simplest plan about how to solve something. Most of these people realize too late, that their approach was rather shitty, unreadable and unmaintainable.

I often see memes about "I forgot what I coded last [insert timespan here]". Though it is kind of normal, if it takes you too long to find out what you wrote, you should consider overthinking your coding approaches.

Just my 50 cents.

Damn I miss coding... 4 weeks of learning & exams is too long...

Computer Science student here, and it looks like my group partners have no idea what keeping classes short and straight to the point means.

The project is in C++, and I'm trying to understand this mess that they made, when they have a class called "Manager" that basically did EVERYTHING, whose header file has only the declarations of functions. 50+ functions. Only half of then documented, and most of them with apparently random names. The file has more than 200 lines of reading.

I've never worked with so much Spaghetti in my life yet.

Worst part: I spent time and effort organising some other classes, breaking down methods, untangling code and all that tedious stuff. But one week before delivery, they decide to delete all of my work, because they "didn't understand it" and didn't even think of asking me to explain the changes.
And if that wasn't enough, they refused to give me some percentage of the grade due to that code not being in the delivery.

I am so freaking done with those guys -_-

My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.

In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff

But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??

For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already

My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience

Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...

They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on

Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...

I think its only reasonable that if I must show u my code during i terview process, I get to see some of the code that I'll get to work with if I'm hired.

Starting to think employers just straight up lie up everything..

Why do i need to find out about your shit code on the first day?!
Cutting edge tech my ass...

Not ONLY does the new code a coworker wrote straight up not work (and they somehow managed to merge it to master) but it also broke an entirely unrelated endpoint due to an abstraction they tried to make. Very clear they didn't even run their code at all.

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.

We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".

It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.

So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.

Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.

Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.

I'm so easily distracted...
Set my self the target of planning a project and then doing a straight Hackathon while writing the most optimised code I can while programming.

Long story short.. Ended up sellotaping a lazer pen to my cats collar and watched her chase her self round the house.
Very productive day.

Raging here, overheating really. One spends thousands on technology that is promoted with the catch phrase "it just works", yet here I am, after updating my fancy new emoji maker (iphone x) to 11.2 and then attempt to carry on working by compiling my code to test some new features. And...

oh, whats this xCode? You have a problem? You can't locate something? You can't locate iOS 11.2 (15C114)... sorry and you think that this "May not" be supported in current version of Xcode?

Let me get this straight you advanced piece of technological wizardy, you know you are missing something, you in fact know what it is, you can actually TELL me what is missing and yet, still, in 2017, you can't go FETCH it?????

Really? All you can do is sit, with that stupid look on your face, and watch the paint dry? Your stuck? That's it?

I hate you for the false pretense of advanced capability. and for your lack of a consistent dark theme so my eyes stop bleeding when reading your "I don't know what to do" messages...

By the way, maybe you can stop randomly crashing, or pinwheeling, I get that your bored as a machine designed to crunch numbers/data/code all day long and that for fun you feel you have to add some color to your subsitance. But stop it. Do what I'm told you can do, "JUST WORK" for once without me having to drag you forward kicking and screaming.

K. that feels better. Now for some whiskey.

Sweet baby Jesus the stories are true. I thought this day would never come but yesterday I found a website in production straight out of a horror story.
Inline script tags that contained spaghetti code and static content. And to top it off inline style with position absolute for everything 😰😰
Also worth mentioning a couple of broken pages(404) and a beatufill repeat-y image for the background😳
I lost all hope😂

So to start off, I am a hipster. Guilty as charged. A few months ago.

Me and my work's programming team decided to enter a hackathon. Note, I had never stayed awake for 48 hours straight programming before.

It was late and I was waiting on programmer 1 to finish writing a class so I can finish a part of the network code. We were all working on the same git repository, same branch for some reason at the time.

So I started just writing in random comments in the code while waiting. I finally got to complete the network and committed my work.

They both made a pull about the same time and both my boss and coworker turned around at the same time.

I had written a comment
// Ya know those glasses I wear to work everyday? They're not prescription. They're fake.

The look of disappointment just staring me down was absolutely priceless. And the fact that they both read the comment at the same time.. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Teaching new devs, hired straight from India.

This is today.

Bug1: We have four lists, each item in these lists has a variable called "Charge". This var is a double and we need to convert it to currency.

Dev creates fifth list called "All lists" and converted it's charge to currency then questioned why it didn't work.

I explained, his solution? Convert each list into currency.

I explained that's wrong and told him what he needed to do. He did List1:Charge into currency, but left his other conversion in place just in case.

I walked him through fixing it which took 10 times as long as necessary, only to find out he randomly converted four booleans into currency for no reason.

Bug2: we take integer, convert to string and concat "Months" on the end.

Doesn't work for him, tells me he doesn't know why.

I told him that he's not outputting the variable that we did it to, he is instead outputting a custom variable he made and didn't do anything to.

Bug 3: followup to #2, he fixed it as I instructed, but then added months as static text to the output so now it reads "Months months".

Bug 4: to make his code cleaner, he presses enter in the text box. Unfortunately he did that IN A STRING so his output is full of random /r/n

How do you guys deal with coworkers like this? He isn't new, this is supposed to be an experienced developer. Im only in my 2nd year

God I fucking hate WordPress

Today I found out a single WooCommerce site is using 20% of database CPU (for comparison, 50 other sites use only 10% between them). Upon investigation it turns out that WooCommerce loads every single product in order to do the taxonomy count. Because the data is stored as PHP-serialised values in post meta, there's no way to do a decent "SELECT count() ... GROUP BY ...". And that code came straight from the WordPress devs, no more and no less...

Dynamically typed languages suck. God I hate them

It's like one big clunky free for all. I don't understand how people can work in Python or even JavaScript and tell me that they're good languages with a straight face

Not having proper autocomplete or documentation (a somewhat seperate issue of Python) is a kick in the stomach for productivity.
I've seen people advocate for using EXTERNAL DOCUMENTATION VIEWERS. WHAT

I hate not being able to enforce types so I can reason about little parts of my program. I hate not having an IDE that can actually help me. I hate having to see stupid grep'ed code snippets instead of nicely formatted javadocs. I hate having to double and triple check everything when trying to code. I hate handling effectively opaque values where I don't know anything about the type without looking it up. And I especially hate not knowing what types function parameters need to be.

Dynamic typing doesn't remove types. That, although completely unfeasible, I could respect.
Oh no, the types are still there. Just not for you

It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

People caught using emojis in code should be driven into the sea.

Otherwise one day its gonna just be straight magic, without reason or understanding.

You're gonna type a bunch of moon runes into a glowing floaty interface, pour the blood of a chicken into a collector tray (totally not a pentagram) and "shit just happens" (tm).

And "scholars" (neckbeards) will spend all their time shape-in-wrong-hole idiocracy-style button mashing their mystical ouija board IDEs in the grim dark future, looking for combinations that do something useful.

Every time it glows red? Compile error.

Every time it glows green? Christmas is near, congrats it compiled.

Every time it sets off a mystical air siren (henceforth known as "fusrohdah"), runtime error. And probably explosions.

In the grim dark future of Apple 40k. A.D, there is only war, warp demons, and pending VSCode updates.

Dev: "I've pushed some code. Give it a code review."
Me: "ok, i'll do it"
<<fast forward>>
Me: "Sounds good to me. Only thing, I wouldn't have gone for all those renames because that was not part of the request, maybe we can discuss ...."
Dev: "I like those names and besides, it's already deployed in production"
Me: " :| .... what's the purpose of a code review when you push straight into production ?

How do you deal with someone like this?

I've got this dev at my workplace that is terrible to work with, he's 2 main reasons why I say this:
1. He has no clue about team work, every piece of code he writes is written as if he is the only person that has to ever touch that
2. He's overtly protective and opinionated on things that make no sense, they're non standard "rules" that he sets and enforces by replacing others code with his own (often times you see quite large PRs and after inspection you realize he rewrote parts of code to follow his style). These "rules" also take up a really long time to follow and would make any actually experienced developer question this guy's knowledge, one example of this is where he repeats the same code over multiple components for "encapsulation reasons" and God forbid you create a global helper of some sort, he'll straight up remove it the next chance he gets. Another example is that all his components or utilities live inside 1 base directory, so you have roughly 300+ components in a /components directory, all with non standard names so you can't tell which is related to which.

I hate working with this person, it's annoying and it also sucks because he's sort of a more "senior" Dev so managers take his side most of the time.

!rant, TL;DR at the bottom

Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]

And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]

and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]

His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]

Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"

Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.

TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.

Manager asked me once
"how many lines of code does a good developer write"

:facepalm: i was so shocked i couldnt answer him straight with a good answer. tried telling him that we are not a factory making nails, i dont know. what would you have said to him?

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

I once inherited a project that had been outsourced for more than 6 months to a company at the other end of the world. Although the PM had almost daily contact with the developer, the project wasn't technically followed up.

I had already recommended code reviews 3 months before I inherited the project. But of course these had never happened.

The project contained all the nice-to-have features, but the core wasn't working. Loading the home page (with 20 records from a DB) took 15 minutes.

We then had roughly a month the get the project straight.

Ever been tasked with a modification, you see the code and think WTF??!!!??

Yes it was me who wrote it, what was I thinking? So I going to have to refactor this rubbish, so I set about tidying it up and realise that this is far more complex than I remember. When I finally get to grips with every aspect of it, I come to the conclusion that actually this is quite clever.

Straight up removed the changes, walked away from the original code and got on with what I was supposed to be doing to start with. Oh well, guess I got to grips with something I had forgotten.

If they followed my suggestion and went straight to debugging the server issues they would have been solved it from week 1 and everyone would have thought the migration had a minor performance hiccup. In fact, we have already done such at least twice before and nobody batted an eye.

Instead they self-labelled the migration a failure on first error, setting the stage for apologizing to the client, and put themselves on the spot for a whole staging / production signoff, replication / backup worfklow, almost a blue-green "seamless" deployment reminiscent of DigitalOcean.

Well they're not DigitalOcean, and anyone who has spent any time understanding users knows they will not participate in "new system" tests long enough to find or report issues.

So of course the migration stretched out to almost three months up until the whole reason for the migration - the rapidly escalating risk of the old provider disappearing - hit like a freight train and now they have to go through the problem of debugging the server like I told them to on week 1. Only this time they've set the client mindset against it, lost any chance of reverting, have had grave risk for data loss, and are under pressure to debug other people's code in real-time.

This is why I don't trust devs to do ops. A dev's first solution to any problem is to throw tech at it.

I've seen a lot of shitty code. REALLY shitty code...but this. Calling this shitty would be a compliment, so I'm not sure what to call it. The following is copied straight from his source code, which I'm tasked with finding a production logic bug in. The original composer of this masterpiece of one-line clusterfucks is no longer with the company of course, so his pile of shit is now my problem. The program is littered with stuff like this.

if(((FrontLowerLeft.X > tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X && FrontLowerLeft.X < tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X + tempPack.Dimensions.Width) || (FrontLowerLeft.X + Dimensions.Width > tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X && FrontLowerLeft.X + Dimensions.Width < tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X + tempPack.Dimensions.Width) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X > FrontLowerLeft.X && tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X < FrontLowerLeft.X + Dimensions.Width) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X + tempPack.Dimensions.Width > FrontLowerLeft.X && tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X + tempPack.Dimensions.Width < FrontLowerLeft.X + Dimensions.Width) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.X == FrontLowerLeft.X && tempPack.Dimensions.Width == Dimensions.Width)) && ((FrontLowerLeft.Y > tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y && FrontLowerLeft.Y < tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y + tempPack.Dimensions.Height) || (FrontLowerLeft.Y + Dimensions.Height > tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y && FrontLowerLeft.Y + Dimensions.Height < tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y + tempPack.Dimensions.Height) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y > FrontLowerLeft.Y && tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y < FrontLowerLeft.Y + Dimensions.Height) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y + tempPack.Dimensions.Height > FrontLowerLeft.Y && tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y + tempPack.Dimensions.Height < FrontLowerLeft.Y + Dimensions.Height) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Y == FrontLowerLeft.Y && tempPack.Dimensions.Height == Dimensions.Height)) && ((FrontLowerLeft.Z > tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z && FrontLowerLeft.Z < tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z + tempPack.Dimensions.Depth) || (FrontLowerLeft.Z + Dimensions.Depth > tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z && FrontLowerLeft.Z + Dimensions.Depth < tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z + tempPack.Dimensions.Depth) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z > FrontLowerLeft.Z && tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z < FrontLowerLeft.Z + Dimensions.Depth) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z + tempPack.Dimensions.Depth > FrontLowerLeft.Z && tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z + tempPack.Dimensions.Depth < FrontLowerLeft.Z + Dimensions.Depth) || (tempPack.FrontLowerLeft.Z == FrontLowerLeft.Z && tempPack.Dimensions.Depth == Dimensions.Depth)))
{
//code that did stuff
//removed for "clarity"
}

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

The other day I went back to my college representing the company that I work for interviews of Freshers. Since I was taking interviews of my immediate juniors, I knew that every candidate’s major is Computers Applications, and we had sent out a JD ‘specifically’ mentioning that we need Devs, so tech people only.
We interviewed 40 people for first round in total out of which 12 were shortlisted for second round (we made them write some code).
Out of 12, 8 straight up refused to write the code saying they weren’t interested in coding at all (even professionally). Made me boil up so much, someone else, much more deserving and willing could have been in their place and may even have the job. But us humans are always cunts.

   Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.
Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out.”
“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”
Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.
Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”
God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”

Sometimes i code straight to production

My manager believes every bug can be solved by adding a thousand printf(s) and checking which part of the code isn't being hit. How do I politely tell him to get his shit straight? 😂😂😂

College Senior Thesis is done. Wrote the whole fucker as a Spring Boot Microserivce and my brain is fucking jello after 4 straight months of work.

I need something lightweight, I need something fun to code as I wind down at the end of the year.
I think I'll play around with Node.js and Typescript and learn about this docker thing people keep talking about before I go back to Java exception hell.

I'm not ready to be a Jr Dev next year. I'm too young to work this kind of job for the next 40 years.

I technically joined just after this guy left(fired) but the stories are to good to tell!

The guy was clearly off but It wasn't his fault he had to of had aspergers

He would demand! To write with two pens in one hand he said it was faster and the only way he could write neatly... (Nope)

I don't think it was to weird but he would put on music and play death metal stuff full volume, because he couldn't hear anyone the team used to make paper planes and fire them at him when they wanted his attention.

Another thing he was into furry ... Stuff but was super open about it had. Wolf's and shit like that on his desk and always had a wolf shirt.

But he was fired, he wasn't great at his job.

I came in to help sort out the mess it was the government's setup for servers and nurses and doctors computers for the NHS over in england.

He effectively skull fucked the entire system.

He magically (I to do day can not understand how) did forced updates and installed to a newer version of Windows servers the problem being the programs wouldn't work on newer windows at the time.

Most were on XP at the time and they used windows servers back then.

Luckily not nation wide just in my local area but still thousands of computers affected.

The issue became this ... You see they had this program on their computers that let them get patient documents and update etc

He removed code or added code that made it update all the laptops and desktops to a new service pack which they didn't want... Then he upgraded the servers to a new windows version I don't remember the specifics

But the updates and new version of Windows made it so the laptops etc couldn't communicate with the servers.

... The next day he got fired and I was brought in for a few weeks to help sort out the mess.

But apparently he was a super interesting guy but with way to many quirks.

It costs the tax payers a fortune! Literally a few million to sort his mistake out people were working round the clock for two weeks straight.

We code hard in these cubicles

My style’s nerd-chic, I’m a programmin’ freak

We code hard in these cubicles

Only two hours to your deadline?

Don’t sweat my technique.

Sippin’ morning coffee with that JAVA swirl.

Born to code; my first words were “Hello World”

Since 95, been JAVA codin’ stayin’ proud

Started on floppy disks, now we take it to the cloud.

On my desktop, JAVA’s what’s bobbin’ and weavin’

We got another winning app before I get to OddEven.

Blazin’ code like a forest fire, climbin’ a tree

Setting standards like I Triple E….
Boot it on up, I use the force like Luke,

Got so much love for my homeboy Duke.

GNU Public Licensed, it’s open source,

Stop by my desk when you need a crash course

Written once and my script runs anywhere,

Straight thuggin’, mean muggin’ in my Aeron chair.

All the best lines of code, you know I wrote ‘em

I’ll run you out of town on your dial-up modem.

Cause…
We code hard in these cubicles

Me and my crew code hyphy hardcore

We code hard in these cubicles

It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve seen the 404.

Inheriting a project can make me go beeee-serk

Ain’t got four hours to transfer their Framework.

The cleaners killed the lights, Man, that ain’t nice,

Gonna knock this program out, just like Kimbo Slice

I program all night, just like a champ,

Look alive under this IKEA lamp.

I code HARDER in the midnight hour,

E7 on the vending machine fuels my power.

Ps3 to Smartphones, our code use never ends,

JAVA’s there when I beat you in “Words with Friends”.

My developing skills are so fresh please discuss,

You better step your game up on that C++.

We know better than to use Dot N-E-T,

Even Dan Brown can’t code as hard as me.

You know JAVA’s gettin’ bigger, that’s a promise not a threat,

Let me code it on your brain

We code hard in these cubicles,

it’s the core component…of what we implement.

We code hard in these cubicles,
Straight to your JAVA Runtime Environment.

We code hard in these cubicles,
Keep the syntax light and the algorithm tight.

We code hard in these cubicles,

Gotta use JAVA if it’s gonna run right.

We code hard in these cubicles

JAVA keeps adapting, you know it’s built to last.

We code hard in these cubicles,

Robust and secure, so our swag’s on blast

CODE HARD

tl;dr; A co-worker and I had an disagreement on our package structure. They went straight to our team lead instead of trying to solve this in our team and by that letting me do my job.

Do I overreact by assuming that this was malicious?

A co-worker asked me to do their code review today. There was nothing really wrong there, mainly something a bad generator created.

However at one point we had a disagreement about the naming structure of the packages. We both agreed to disagree, so I thought we could bring that up in the next daily, as it's something the team should agree on.

Shortly after that, they told me on Slack, that they relayed the matter to our team lead to get their opinion. Wtf.

My role in the team is that of a technical lead. Even though I like to discuss such topics in the team and not straight up dictate decisions.

By going directly to our team leader, they basically circumvented the whole team. This really rubs me wrong the way.

Maybe I'm just overreacting?

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

So, I have a coding task that takes several days to complete. How can I pick up the next day where I left off the night before? I find it difficult to get straight back into the flow because I first have to find my way around the previous day's code. Any tips?