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TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN
I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳
We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;
JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).
HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).
There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.
No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.
You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.
Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!
Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!
Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.
...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!22 -
Having PHP as my most useful skill.
I know various other languages, but they're either too exotic for professional use, or my knowledge about them doesn't have the same depth as with PHP.
People joke about how awful PHP is, and it's not entirely true. The incongruous stuff such as confusing parameter ordering can be fixed with libraries. And PHP7 fixed a lot of the ugly stuff. A good dev can certainly write structured, readable, performant PHP code.
But there is a real hard limit. PHP is missing more complex type definitions present in other languages. A weak type system is like building stuff with popsicle sticks and bits of duct tape, it works fast and perfectly fine for small projects, but the lack of strictness is a problem when you have thousands of classes intertwined in all kinds of complex factory, service and repository patterns. And the simple type hints are still newish and fully optional, which means a lot of people don't use them.
So I regret getting stuck in this self reinforcing loop, where I learn more about a very imperfect language through employment, and keep rolling into jobs using that skill because it's what I'm most experienced with.16 -
So this other senior dev got seriously ill a couple of weeks ago and the project he was working on was assigned to me. His code was so aesthetic, loved his work, the structured code helped me a lot in meeting the deadlines. He returned a few days back and now the company has given him two weeks notice because "his pace is slow". I am frustrated, PM is frustrated. The guy is such a gem that he is still helping with all the new requirements client is throwing at us.8
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Roommate: I thought you aren't into social media...
Me: This is devRant, it's different.
Roommate: How so.
Me: It's for like minds, very well structured and has this fun feature which let's me create myself as a cartoon for my profile pic.
Next Day..........…......……
Me: (walks into the room) Why are you laughing and why are you using my phone.
Roommate: I THINK I LOVE THIS APP. I might actually download it.
Note: Roommate is a musician who studied CS in school.7 -
Anyone else notice this trend:
1. Don't go to uni / drop out (who needs education).
2. Get a job in IT, it pays well (who cares you don't have a structured logic).
3. Learn need-to-know stuff only (I only need to know my code).
4. Tell others they should get into programming, it's not that hard.
5. Get asked about the workings of a computer, but that's not in your domain of work. "I only code".
Millennial much ?13 -
So I missed the first 3 days of my programming class. Once I showed up to the 4th the professor was really cool about it. She informs me on the HW I missed and so after the test she handed me (which was overdue as well) I started on the HW. By the end of the class I show her the exercises I did and just by how I structured each function (Python btw) she could tell that I was advanced for the class... I was surprised when she said that I didn't have to show up to the class because it would be a waste of my time, and that I can use the time to focus on personal projects. She offered to help me out with database dev (which ironically I planned on reading head first sql after a design pattern book). The thing that hit home was when she said "I think you're going to be a great programmer."31
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Developers coding cycle:
Start of Project - "Right, I am going to make this code clean and structured."
Deadline looming - "F**k it, just throw the code in there and get it finished".2 -
WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?
WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?
When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.
I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.
Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.
The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.
I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.
She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.
She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.
She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.
And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.
And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.
But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.
I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.
I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.11 -
Four meetings today.
Legal was not involved in legal agreement changes until I refused to make them without Legal signing off. Legal changed several things, leading to:
Project scope changed size from large to minuscule to small to medium.
Details changed at every step.
Despite being incredibly structured and process-heavy, people at this company are so disorganized. 😕4 -
I developed a simple scholarship management system for my school using Laravel, MySQL, jQuery and Bootstrap, I did it for free since college students from my country have to pay social service to get their degrees. Everyone in the scholarships department seemed to be really happy with my work and they evaluated my social service with 10/10, but yesterday they asked for one last favor: to go talk to the new social service guy who'll be supposed to maintain my project, a mid 30's dude who was really pissed off from the beginning because he wasn't even able to deploy the project, he wasn't even able to clone the project from Github. Ok, so I tried to explain to him the tools I used and how the project was structured, but everything I said seemed to piss him even more, so I stopped and had a chat like:
Me: "Look man, do you know or at least have basic concepts of PHP and MVC frameworks?"
Guy: "Yes, but I'm a project manager, not just –despectively– any programmer, and you didn't write proper documentation, it's impossible to deploy your project with the manual you wrote, I cannot work like this".
*We go to their computer and I clone and setup the project in 3 minutes.
Guy: "Yes, but I still don't know how the project works, I need everything documented. If I have to change something, I don't know where to look.
Me: "Man, that's why asked you about knowing PHP MVC frameworks".
Guy: "I cannot work like this, nothing is documented, I don't even know what's that software you're using *points at Sublime Text*. Or tell me, can you arrive at a place where they expect you to work with something you don't know and they have no documentation?"
*At this point he was really pissed
Me: "Well... Dealing with non-documented software is what I do for a living"
Guy: "I don't know what companies you've worked for, probably not big ones..."
Me: "Well, I actually work for *I mention one of the biggest music apps in the country*"
*Guy ironically laughs
When I gave my feedback to the lady in charge of the department, I told her that this guy was really pissed off at how things were done and that I wasn't so sure of him being capable of maintaining the system. She told me not to worry, that the guy became a well known asshole in the office only after a few days, and that she'll probably have to find something else for him to do. It'd be hilarious if this guy ends up capturing scholarships in the system I made.4 -
No matter how much product owners claim "bugs have priority over anything else", "we value high quality structured code", and "we do test driven development"...
...Once a big client wants a feature to be developed before they sign up, dirty code will be written from napkin specs, and that code will always be refractored "soon".4 -
Whoever implemented the data import in Numbers on Mac needs to be lined up against a wall and shot with needles until they wish they were dead.
Why on all of gods unholy green and shitty earth would i want data i import (EVEN IN CSV FOR FUCK SAKE) to be delimited by an arbitrary text width? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
WHY WHY why would I EVER want to delimit my carefully structured data by fucking text width instead of new line or comma? AAAAARRRHHH
And what fucking big brain genius made this the DEFAULT SETTING for imported text AND CSV FILES. IT STANDS FOR COMMA SEPARATED FILE YOU FUCK BOI MAYBE JUST MAYBE I WANT IT SEPARATED BY FUCKING COMMMMMMMAAAAASSSSSS9 -
I have to start my best moment last year with a confession: I moved from Dev to Test half a decade ago. Naturally I do a lot of automation. My Best moment was when Dev said my automation code is so well structured that he wants to work on that and not an the production code anymore. Gave me that warm "still got it" feeling 😊2
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Post my vaccination break, I login to work today and this is waiting there for me..
My designer just dropped this note in our channel where we have our entire team including directors (my manager),
"I wanted to specifically give kudos to Floyd for creating the Confluence page for XYZ feature requirement.
It's so elaborate and very well structured 👏🏻"
And my Tech director adds to it and appreciates my efforts.
My TPM kept praising various new initiatives that I started and how it made him happy to see the progress + how everything was organised.
My skip level manager kept appreciating the work entire previous week and even in a meeting we had just before I started typing this post.
I feel like I have settled really well in this new org + started gaining trust of teams and leadership.
I need to continue the momentum before I start leading the product independently (a few more weeks should be good).
Now two things I am expecting in return, is good amount of international travel + good timely hikes.
And what's interesting is that my employer is known for these exact two things.
So fingers crossed.. 🤞🏻5 -
Why are we still having degree vs autodidact arguments/debates?
It's fucking 2018, who gives a flying fuck how you learn?
Stop giving a shit about how people learn and give a shit about their abilities and skills.
I'm tired of people from both sides (people with degrees and autodidacts) acting like they're better than the other. Stop being arrogant cunts.
Some people have the self control and motivation to teach themselves.
Congratulations! That's fucking awesome.
Others don't and could use a structured environment like University to motivate and encourage them.
Hey it happens. At least you're trying.
My god. Just stop with this shit already. It's annoying and unnecessary.
If you made it this far, how's your week been going?26 -
Some companies are structured and work as cults.
Went to company party several days ago and felt as if I was 🧠 🧼. The way they talk about the company, people, “mission”, social structure of employees etc. I literally felt as the only one who’s seeing through it.
Note to self: If I were to start my own company, I have to read a bunch of books about cults.
Anyone else worked at cult-like startups?17 -
Not sure if I should be happy of I should cry.
...
I woke early today so I could directly start working on my little project to make some progress.
I was coding for ~10 hours.. The code worked fine for all testcases, except for one. I debugged for hours and I couldnt figure out what was wrong. I tried changing stuff in my code and it got more and more messy to the point where I couldn't even understand my own code anymore. I was so frustrated ...
> Deleted everything I made today.
> Rewrote the entire thing in one hour with a different, more structured approach.
> Worked perfectly for all cases, even the very complex ones.
1 day wasted....
Should I be happy that I came up with something decent in the end? I am still mad cause I wasted the entire day.. Why did I not directly went for the thing I did in the end ..? ._.8 -
I suddenly realized all the technical debt shit I told my boss would happen years ago given the way things were done/heading then... Just occurred pretty much all at once last week in the form of critical production issues...
The teams like:
-we need real time server process monitoring
-structured logging for apps
-containerization so one app didn't affect others
Me thinking: yes.... I told you so like 3/4 years ago when I first joined the team and kept repeating so much I got tired of saying at every annual review...
This is exactly what happens when you let technical debt grow and have no free time for developers to look into and fix then while they were small and not critical production processes... Or properly document and peer review them... (Got a shit pile of projects that no one knows how to use or even exists because the devs left the team) and they'll have a lot more when I finally leave... Hopefully this year.... If I can find another role and not need another medical procedure... (Doubtful)3 -
> be me
> post-well-structured question on SO
> very next millisecond, the question gets downvoted
> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯6 -
Fuck (some of) you backend developers who think regurgitating JSON makes for a good API.
"It's all in JSON. iOS can read JSON, right?"
A well-trained simian can read JSON, still doesn't mean it can do something with it. Your shitty API could be spitting out fucking ancient Egyptian for all I care, just make it be the same ancient Egyptian everywhere!
Don't create one endpoint that spits out the URL for the next endpoint (completely different domain, completely different path structure). Are you fucking kidding me?
As if that wasn't enough, endpoints receive data structured in one way, but return results in another!! "It's all JSON", but it's still dong.
How do I abstract that, you piece of shit? Now I have to write ever so slightly different code in multiple places instead of writing it only once.
How the fuck do I even model that in a database?
Have a crash course on implementing APIs on the client side and only come back when you're done.
Morons.6 -
So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.
Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).
I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.
I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?
Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.11 -
I don't understand why so many devs complain about not having money or complain about the company that they work for. We literally have the skills to do whatever the fuck we want in today's world. Literally everything is structured around what we do. If you hate your life so much, do something about it. Granted, I understand if you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to control your own destiny but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the people on this app has the ability to do so. The rewards are endless if you decide to think outside the box just a little bit. Sorry, this has just been on my mind for a while and decided to rant about it here since that's what this app is for.14
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You know you learned a lot in the last year when you try to change something on a website you made 1 year ago and it is almost impossible.
The code is not well structured. PHP mixed with HTML, functions that should be organized as a class etc.
I really, really, need to refactor the entire site!4 -
Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.
The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.
Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!
You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.
I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.
Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.
ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....
If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.
Lol
7 -
I hate it when code line are structured like this.Get().Start().Trim().Where(a=>a.id = newId).ToList().ConvertAll(...).EndMaybe().Name
Are you a fkin compiler or what3 -
First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.
My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.
I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.
That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.
I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."
If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.
Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.15 -
Be careful when you go down the rabbit hole of creating custom observables (rxJS).
I wasted half a day just to find out that there are hot and cold observables and that the whole time I tried to use the wrong one.
It finally works. 01:00 in the morning.
My boss will be proud when he pulls the changes and the code looks completely fucked up (clean, well structured code, but he doesn't really know observables).
Now something different: Sleep. Cya. -
At this point i'd like to talk about the original PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf, who was obviously too distracted by his own beard while watching the NBA Playoffs in 1995 to write a proper language.
There's not a language more inconsistent, ilogical, deficient, and best of all, bad structured.
Seriously, which substances was he smoking when thinking up such things as: non objective strings, incasesensitive functions and associative arrays?
What have objects ever done? any other honorable language does that, python, javascript, rails, C#, take your pick.
Not to mention the order of needle/haystack parameters.4 -
try philosophy()
catch markAsSpam()
Do you ever think of organizations as people? People personify Google and stuff all the time, but I mean something deeper.
When I look at devRant threads, I feel like we're all part of a collective consciousness, growing and thinking and making decisions. Society is a living thing of its own, in the same way that living cells unknowingly make up an individual body. When a question is asked from one node, another node answers, and the result is a repository of questions, answers, opinions, and jokes on an app that might appear as the scrolling thoughts of a singular mind rife with pure, aggressively structured information.12 -
when you spend hours trying to patch code you poorly structured of which 30 minutes is enough to rewrite the whole damn thing.5
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One of the most infuriating ideas in software development culture is that you can build maintainable applications without a strictly enforced type system and structured data.
Sure, it's more fun to wack around a dynamically typed system until it works or to write a major application with mutable datastructures... It's a least fun until a few years in and you have to debug an unexpected overwrite or a inconsistent use of an object property or whatever.
Anyone who writes maintainable code eventually figures out that you need rules and procedures, the issue with JavaScript, python, ruby, lisp, etc developers is that they think it's us developers that needs to enforce these rules instead of the compiler (which is infinitely better at it).48 -
The role of a Product Manager is just a decade or two old. Most organisations, including FAANG, are still figuring out what are the primary responsibilities of a PM.
A vast majority I know, including my dumbass, is struggling to keep things floating while in the role. Learning on the job is one of the only and most effective way to do so.
No wonder, imposter syndrome is so common in this group.
One of the main tasks is to make decisions. Important and impactful ones. The role came into existence to take the decision making load off our engineering friends while building any product.
This shit comes with huge responsibility.
BUT, not everyone understand this. In India, being a developer was a cool thing until 2018 and so everyone rushed into the role. Now somehow everyone started thinking being a Product Manager is cool because all you have to do is sit and shoot orders and things will happen magically.
I get reached out by so many folks every month asking for guidance and when I ask them what a PM does or why they want to be a PM, the narrative is more or less same.
Very few actually understand how taxing the role is or the challenges that we face while performing the job.
WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE SO IGNORANT AND DUMB?
And in another news, my first week at new job was super amazing. Loved every bit of it. People are smart, processes are neat, things are structured, and lots and lots to learn for me.
How are you guys doing? Been a while that we spoke.
Official declaration: I am the dumbest person I know.10 -
I spent the last weeks rewriting a huge project which I had to hurriedly write a year ago. No comments, no documentation, spaghetti code. Part me was an asshole! But now I am done, all is new, everything is well commented, structured in classes with well defined tasks. Yay.2
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As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:
FUCK REACT!
It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"
Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.
Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)
And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.
And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.
In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...
I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.
They must be a MESS to maintain.
For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?
Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.
Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.
If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)13 -
It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.
When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.
The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.
I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.
Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)2 -
These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.
Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.
I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.
I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:
1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.
2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!
For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.
Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.
3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.
4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.
I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.
I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.
Also, what has helped you when you first started out?
Thanks!!5 -
Years ago, we were setting up an architecture where we fetch certain data as-is and throw it in CosmosDb. Then we run a daily background job to aggregate and store it as structured data.
The problem is the volume. The calculation step is so intense that it will bring down the host machine, and the insert step will bring down the database in a manner where it takes 30 min or more to become accessible again.
Accommodating for this would need a fundamental change in our setup. Maybe rewriting the queries, data structure, containerizing it for auto scaling, whatever. Back then, this wasn't on the table due to time constraints and, nobody wanted to be the person to open that Pandora's box of turning things upside down when it "basically works".
So the hotfix was to do a 1 second threadsleep for every iteration where needed. It makes the job take upwards of 12 hours where - if the system could endure it - it would normally take a couple minutes.
The solution has grown around this behavior ever since, making it even harder to properly fix now. Whenever there is a new team member there is this ritual of explaining this behavior to them, then discussing solutions until they realize how big of a change it would be, and concluding that it needs to be done, but...
not right now.2 -
The moment when you are too scared to make any needed changes in your code fearing you will untumble all the structured mess of spaghetti code you have written... 😳😨😕5
-
Inspired by @COD4's rant here: https://devrant.com/rants/3080528, I decided to go overboard a bit and catalogue (almost) all my unused Humble Bundle keys.
Given that there was well in excess of 300 of them I decided a more structured distribution mechanism was needed.
If you want to see if any are interesting for you, check the repository here: https://github.com/kwilliams1987/...
I have 5 more months of Humble Monthly to do still but need a break now...14 -
How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.
I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'
I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out
>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '
now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!
How to make that clear!4 -
TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.
Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.
But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).
Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.
Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.
So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.
I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.
How do you cope with something like this?6 -
So I just spent the last few hours trying to get an intro of given Wikipedia articles into my Telegram bot. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an API! But unfortunately it's born as a retard.
First I looked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and almost thought that that was a Wikipedia article about API's. I almost skipped right over it on the search results (and it turns out that I should've). Upon opening and reading that, I found a shitload of endpoints that frankly I didn't give a shit about. Come on Wikipedia, just give me the fucking data to read out.
Ctrl-F in that page and I find a tiny little link to https://mediawiki.org/wiki/... which is basically what I needed. There's an example that.. gets the data in XML form. Because JSON is clearly too much to ask for. Are you fucking braindead Wikipedia? If my application was able to parse XML/HTML/whatevers, that would be called a browser. With all due respect but I'm not gonna embed a fucking web browser in a bot. I'll leave that to the Electron "devs" that prefer raping my RAM instead.
OK so after that I found on third-party documentation (always a good sign when that's more useful, isn't it) that it does support JSON. Retardpedia just doesn't use it by default. In fact in the example query that was a parameter that wasn't even in there. Not including something crucial like that surely is a good way to let people know the feature is there. Massive kudos to you Wikipedia.. but not really. But a parameter that was in there - for fucking CORS - that was in there by default and broke the whole goddamn thing unless I REMOVED it. Yeah because CORS is so useful in a goddamn fucking API.
So I finally get to a functioning JSON response, now all that's left is parsing it. Again, I only care about the content on the page. So I curl the endpoint and trim off the bits I don't need with jq... I was left with this monstrosity.
curl "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php/...=*" | jq -r '.query.pages[0].revisions[0].slots.main.content'
Just how far can you nest your JSON Wikipedia? Are you trying to find the limits of jq or something here?!
And THEN.. as an icing on the cake, the result doesn't quite look like JSON, nor does it really look like XML, but it has elements of both. I had no idea what to make of this, especially before I had a chance to look at the exact structured output of that command above (if you just pipe into jq without arguments it's much less readable).
Then a friend of mine mentioned Wikitext. Turns out that Wikipedia's API is not only retarded, even the goddamn output is. What the fuck is Wikitext even? It's the Apple of wikis apparently. Only Wikipedia uses it.
And apparently I'm not the only one who found Wikipedia's API.. irritating to say the least. See e.g. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...
Needless to say, my bot will not be getting Wikipedia integration at this point. I've seen enough. How about you make your API not retarded first Wikipedia? And hopefully this rant saves someone else the time required to wade through this clusterfuck.12 -
That feeling when a feature is estimated to take 4 hours but, thanks to your well structured code and good use of object oriented programming you implement it in 30 minutes and can spend the rest optimising something else.2
-
My intern was trained on 1 semester of Java, followed by 2 of Python, so there’s been several conversations at the office that boil down to:
“What’s *not* to love about Python? It’s easy to pick up, and forgiving as hell!”
“What’s *to* love about Python? I like being able to understand how my code is structured!”
As a WordPress shop, the discussion is moot, of course...4 -
Looking at anyone else's code in things I use. I just think to myself "damn this is so neat and structured, I've never made something like this"1
-
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
The frustration that comes to each developer when he tries to write the code structured by thinking through each situations, and your team lead comes and tells you why r you doing so much validations just hard code them we need to release it today client is waiting. After 3-4 months the same team lead goes through the code and shouts at you telling why the he'll you hard coded all these, can't you write the code correctly by thinking through.
3 -
Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...
So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together
So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.
Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?
After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.
Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.
The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.
Lockdown started.
There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.
A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.
Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!
It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.
The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.
Suddenly my manager is fired.
Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.
The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.
Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.
...
...
Fuck
"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.
...
It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.
I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.
But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.
It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.
So yeah, sorry for the rambling.4 -
HR wanted a Feedback-Interview, they choose me because I am new (first job as a Developer).
They wanted the pros/cons from my perspective and how to get more people into the company.
There was nothing bad that I could have said about the company, I really had to watch out so it doesnt sound like I wanna crawl into someones ass.
It changed when we talked about programming itself...
I am a ABAP Developer, we are developing with the EWM Extension. If you dont happen to know what I am talking about then you didnt miss a thing. Documentation feels like its not existend, the language is made to be red like Text for easy use but does a terrible job at that, the standard editor that you have to use lacks a ton of usefull features, the standard functions and classes that you HAVE to use are not structured well and need to be debugged to know how to use them, and and....
There is much more, but if the company wouldnt be so damn nice, I might have wanted to go away already.
ABAP: Advanced Business Application Programming.
EWM: Extended Warehouse Management.7 -
My file structure:
Documents -
- That one impeccably structured folder that I never remember to put anything in
- Gigantic project folder that will some day kill me in my sleep
- That one unrelated folder that all of my non project scripts just end up in. No structure whatsoever
- about 2 billion loose files5 -
I am so fucking lost.
I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.
There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.
I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.
While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.
But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.
But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.
These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.
And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.
It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.
Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.
But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.
However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.
As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.
1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.
I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.
2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.
I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.
It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.16 -
There is a commercially sold ERP solution that has it's DB schema in excel and Other documentations in MS Word. And its not even properly structured, no schema diagrams, last updated for a 4 year old major release 😒😫.
I have to develop a custom module for it and that requires building an ActivexDLL Project in VB fucking 6 😭😭 .
VB6
Unstructured Documentation
Legacy code
Incomplete documentation
FML
Tell me if you want ss in comments.5 -
Meeting at 'Derp & Co', the topic was what data model should send the back-end to frontend & app via API calls:
- Coworker: 'we should send the data structured like this for reasons'.
- Me: 'Yeah, this nested object.object.object should do the trick for the front end, but this will be a pain in the ass to convert to POJOs. Why not use something like idk better structure?'
<Mad/intrigued faces>
- CoworkerS: 'Why you need to use POJOs?'
- Me: <More Mad> 'cause I work with java in android... and we have/need/like objects?
<Captain Obvious left the room>
- CoworkerS: 'Oh yeah, well... we can do it the way you say'.
Why you need Objects... what is the next?
- Git? For what? Did not have the usb key from day one?2 -
Fiddling with the UiPath RPA tool. What the fuck is this monster?
So, you create apps by drawing a flowchart, like some kid using Scratch. Then, suddenly, you have to create a .NET object just to get a random number!
Who the fuck is the target audience that can create objects, call a directory read function, etc, but can't write a loop?! Show me that fucking person.
Then I have to debug the fucking selectors when they don't work correct. All this requires is understanding how UIs are structured under the hood. So, you know that a menu bar is a window, but you need to draw a fucking if statement?!
And how would you debug and manage this monstrosity?
It like we learned nothing from all the Excel apps we build for decades.
I mean, it's an impressive app. But, why does it exist?
Someone needs to stop this before it gets out into the wild or we'll all be debugging flowchart a created by business analysts.
You have been warned. Join the fight or accept the consequences.1 -
The moment when you have crafted a beautiful, flexible and well structured package.
Everything including the automated tests are flawless..
but you cant help but feel like something, somewhere is horrible wrong... :D -
I found it rather convinient to take a paperbook and a pen and wirte down the tasks, i have to do maybe with subtasks and add checkboxes.
Then the next day, i mark the tasks i finished and take over the jobs i didn't finish for the next period.
And i take time for writing nicely to make my handwriting more readable.
Therefire i have my slacking(writing nicely), i have my structure by having structured tasks and subtasks and i have my reward in checking the boxes.
Bonus points for getting a feeling, how much i can archieve in one day. -
I think this is the first time ever on my team where I read someone else's source code and actually went "wow... This is pretty well written and structured". No god methods or classes.
-
The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code.
~Paul Graham -
When someone (and this is typically someone non-dev and not a very structured person) says "Can I ask you a question" and, upon an affirmative answer to that, fires away a whole bunch of questions without waiting for an answer to the first of the questions.
Pleeeease! If you expect an answer, ask me one. question. at. a. time. Or write a freaking e-mail.3 -
The worst co worker I had is actually pretty recent. He joined a well integrated team on what was basically a legacy project. He sounded like a good developer and seemed to know his stuff but it took him ages to push out fixes/features. They were always massively over-engineered, poorly named, partially tested and what documentation he did write still managed to bitch about how poor the project was structured.
He spent most of his time bitching about the general shitty nature of the project (he wasn't wrong) and the lack of interest from other Devs.
He was so unpleasant in interpersonal communication that by the end no one would work with him.
In his last team meeting he basically said he was glad to be going and that we were all lazy, disinterested and shouldn't consider ourselves his peers. The equivalent of storming out of a party after setting the couch on fire and shitting in the sink.
We've since removed all his overcomplicated, not standard, unmaintainable code. -
Spent another half day learning ELK and how to programatically query and run aggregations against the data that's now collected.
So I can feed it into a testing framework for releases.
I sorta feel like I'm dragging everyone else into the light...
Like "you see what you've been missing all these years? This is how it's supposed to be these days..."
Data data data... Useful data.... This is what you can do when have structured and searchable logs rather then huge messy text files ...6 -
(Apprentice dev)
Cut me some slack ;)
Learning JavaScript for a few days To a week to familiarise myself with it and really get to grips with it.
Then have to go on to jQuery which is a lot a fun I must say, very easy structured framework to learn and found myself getting really engrossed into it.
Now for the past few days I've been learning angular1 which is a really cool framework, can be a little bit complicated at times but it is learnable
Moral of the story is you never stop learning! Which isn't a bad thing by the way I'm finding web developing a lot of fun!7 -
Agile is stupid.
You’re trying to build an application based on data that doesn’t exist yet, and that changes weekly; surely it makes more sense for the API to be built and in place before someone tries to create a front end?
The client decides they want an extra feature 1/2 way through which changes the way it should work yet again.
What you end up with is some rigid and poorly structured architecture, that might work - but how you have no time to refactor it to make it good, an account manager that doesn’t understand what the problem is, and a team of developers wondering wtf you were thinking when you wrote this pos4 -
just found out a vulnerability in the website of the 3rd best high school in my country.
TL;DR: they had burried in some folders a c99 shell.
i am a begginer html/sql/php guy and really was looking into learning a bit here and there about them because i really like problem solving and found out ctfs mainly focus on this part of programming. i am a c++ programmer which does school contest like programming problems and i really enjoy them.
now back on topic.
with this urge to learn more web programming i said to myself what other method to learn better than real life sites! so i did just that. i first checked my school site. right click. inspect element. it seemed the site was made with wordpress. after looking more into the html code for the site i concluded all the images and files i could see on the site were from a folder on the server named 'wp-content/uploads'. i checked the folder. and here it got interesting. i did a get request on the site. saw the details. then i checked the site. bingo! there are 3 folders named '2017', '2018', '2019'. i said to myself: 'i am god.'
i could literally see all the announcements they have made from 2017-2019. and they were organised by month!!! my curiosity to see everything got me to the final destination.
with this adrenaline i thought about another site. in my city i have the 3rd most acclaimed high school in the country. what about checking their security?
so i typed the web address. looked around. again, right click, inspect element and looked around the source code. this time i was more lucky. this site is handmade!!! i was soooo happy because with my school's site i was restricted with what they have made with wordpress and i don't have much experience with it.
amd so i began looking what request the site made for the logos and other links. it seemed all the other links on the site were with this format: www.site.com/index.php?home. and i was very confused and still am. is this referencing some part of the site in the index.php file? is the whole site written inside the index.php file and with the question mark you just get to a part of the site? i don't really get it.
so nothing interesting inside the networking tab, just some stylesheets for the site's design i guess. i switched to the debugger tab and holy moly!! yes, it had that tree structure. very familiar. just like a project inside codeblocks or something familiar with it. and then it clicked me. there was the index.php file! and there was another folder from which i've seen nothing from the network tab. i finally got a lead!! i returned in the network tab, did a request to see the spgm folder and boooom a site appeared and i saw some files and folders from 2016. there was a spgm.js file and a spgm.php file. there was a contrib, flavors, gal and lang folders. then it once again clicked me! the lang folder was las updated this year in february. so i checked the folder and there were some files named lang with the extension named after their language and these files were last updated in 2016 so i left them alone. but there was this little snitch, this little 650K file named after the name of the school's site with the extension '.php' aaaaand it was last modified this year!!!! i was so excited! i thought i found a secret and different design of the site or something completely else! i clicked it and at first i was scared there was this black/red theme going on my screen and something was a little odd. there were no school announcements or event, nononoooo. this was still a tree structured view. at the top of the site it's written '!c99Shell v. 1.0...'
this was a big nono. i saw i could acces all kinds of folders. then i switched to the normal school website and tried to access a folder i have seen named userfiles and got a 403 forbidden error. wopsie. i then switched to the c99 shell website and tried to access the userfiles folder and my boy showed all of its contents. it was nakeeed naked. like very naked. and in the userfiles folder there were all, but i mean ALL files and folders they have on the server. there were a file with the salary of each job available in the school. some announcements. there was a list with all the students which failed classes. there were folders for contests they held. it was an absolute mess and i couldn't believe it.
i stopped and looked at the monitor. what have i done? just to learn some web programming i just leaked the server of the 3rd most famous high school in my country. image a black hat which would have seriously caused more damage. currently i am writing an email to the school to updrage their security because it is reaaaaly bad.
and the journy didn't end here. i 'hacked' the site 2 days ago and just now i thought about writing an email to the school. after i found i could access the WHOLE server i searched for the real attacker so if you want to knkw how this one went let me know in the comments.
sorry for the long post, but couldn't held it anymore13 -
Can't wait until I'm done at my current workplace (about a month left). I've had enough of this fucking shitty ass ancient ASP.Net ERP-system and employer.
For the system:
1. The build times are horrendous and eats up all CPU power.
2. The "classic" UI and UX is absolute garbage. If I was an accountant, I would go nuts trying to invoice someone. Companies pay millions to use this garbage.
3. Besides the "classic UI", there is a mishmash of different JS frameworks plastered on top.
4. Absolute no fucking technical documentation whatsoever
5. The in-house relational database is a mess, no relations, entirely denormalized, no documentation.
6. The frontend is structured in HTML tables with iframes inside <td>
The company:
1. If you're a implementation consultant and you quit your job, you get stripped off all your projects, you won't get to join anything social and you're placed on 1st line support for three months. They might as well force them out.
2. Anyone can work from home anytime they feel like it without any valid reasons, and believe me they do.
3. The senior devs are overworked as all hell. By the end of the year, some of them have hundreds of flextime hours and won't get anything in return.
4. The CEO seems like a jolly guy, but when you quit, he doesn't like you at all. He also acts like a bigshot, always getting driven around meetings when there is literally a very good metro network in this city.9 -
On a digital marketing course.
Teacher:
"Web pages are made of structured content and style, that's HTML and CSS. There are also many programming languages, like JavaScript or Python, but we are not discussing those here because it's computer freaks stuff. Now let's talk about cookies..."
Me: Should I kill myself now or wait until that man stops saying shit an die killing him too...?1 -
Its good and practical but those who aim to fill gaps in the programming industry by trying to produce "programmers on demand" via a several month long bootcamp are complete idiots. Nobody can learn to develop a well structured application that's easy to maintain in a couple of months, either that is frontend or back end. We are trying to be engineers , not just solve problems.
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TIL Github renders markdown YAML frontmatter as nested markdown tables! Awesome as lightweight structured data documentation tool
1 -
Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.
Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.
I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.
Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.9 -
when the client sends you a long and very detailled/structured .xlsx to explain fixes... and it turns out it's just a typo in the footer.
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The best dev advice a dev has given me is to write clean and structured code from the very start of every project. Changed my life in general.
"How you do one thing is how you do everything." -
Bunyan
Bunyan is a simple and fast JSON logging library for node.js services
Server logs should be structured. JSON's a good format. Let's do that. A log record is one line of JSON.stringify'd output. Let's also specify some common names for the requisite and common fields for a log record.11 -
"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.
As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?
Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?
This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.
doomsday out 🤟 -
Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194
There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?
Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.
The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.1 -
I liked to toy with and edit stupid batch scripts in high school and put them on school computers to see if kids run them
Lucked into an internship that was structured enough to learn but laid back enough to have freedom to learn on my own my way. And it included programming
Semester after had a python elective. Was ahead of everyone due to my internship so teacher let me do what I want to if I help other students so I just experimented with stuff
Few months after high school I dropped out of one college after a gap year I ended up in an associates in programming program at another college. Graduated July 2020
I feel I'm doing alright for myself most of the time -
On the MSc I was participating in, there is a teacher that has a lesson about Databases.
The MSc was not only for experience computer science students. We were informed that the first semester would be as an introduction to all.
So, Databases. No introduction at all. Just read the powerpoint and the pdf he had just translated (or not, because some were just from the internet), just refers to how they are structured briefly. He showed everything about Databases without the students that didn't know much to be involved (we didn't get to our lab for some reason) and then there was his assignment.
His assignment was written as it would be from a customer that knows shit about Databases (sorry but I had to rant). We sat down student's that knew already Databases and some of us worked as database engineers. We agreed on some steps that after read the next chapter of the assignment we reconfigured them. And so on, until we had nothing and we were back at the beginning.
Needless to say, I did not lose my Christmas holidays for him. It took me 2 days after to build a database that was not a full solution but a part (I wad noy sure, the assignment was ambiguous). I passed the lesson with the minimum passable grade.
So, I wrote a nice email to the MSc teacher that had to organize it (or something like that). I did not swear at all. I was professional and wrote what I encountered and what it should have been. The Databases teacher had always that smirk and face that he was THE boss and had no respect for his own lesson. But I didn't mention it. The organizing teacher shared the email with the databases teacher.
And the time came that we had another lesson (web development, it was awful under him) with the databases teacher. And he had the wonderful idea to read the email out loud in front if everyone. He did noy mention my name. I raised my hand and told my colleagues it was me. Then I asked him in front of them, if he was contented with the results (only a few passed the databases lesson and max grade was the smallest passable), first he avoided the question. I asked again. And he said yes. We all looked at each other and somehow knew. No one spoke and I didn't push because I didn't want to take the web lesson's hours for this. It was just hopeless.
From there on, the teachers said we were their best class ever but the most complaining one. They didn't even bother to analyze the "complaints".
So, there you go. One of the lot of those teachers.1 -
Hey guys, I need some junior advice. I work at a small startup in a team with 2 other backend developers.
The "new" guy studied at a university for a few years. He writes beautiful code. I try to learn from it and use his short hands a lot. I came from highschool and don't have a degree in it (yet).
I recently wrote a piece of code which handles some timeslot logic. I was really proud of it.
New guy needs to fix a bug and add a few things. He completely refactors my code and makes it more structured and partly better. The logic stayed the same.
It sort of bothers me that he touches my (precious) code. How do you guys handle these things?21 -
My life with C++:
- my first course about coding was an intro to C++ for scientists (I studied physics), because "everybody uses it in the field". I never used it in my life in physics;
- I got back to it this year because I was planning on doing some interesting simulations with it;
- hence, this summer I started learning it again. I took one month to actually follow a structured tutorial so I could get at least slightly proficient for what I needed to build;
- and nothing, after one month without using it, I forgot so much already, and I feel like I'm going back to case one.
...now I remember how I felt as a student, when I was preparing for exams.8 -
Fuck accessibility.
No WAIT, before you call me an asshole hear me out.
So when you use CSS grid to create layouts you're supposed to not use the features it has (reordering items) too much, and instead keep the HTML structured the way it's supposed to be read.
When you add a picture of a cat you're supposed to put a alt="Brown cat sitting on a chair" there.
Also you should test for all kinds of sight disabilities and use high contrast colors.
All that for likely <1% of your users.
What would be the alternative? HTML is a markup language, and not supposed to be directly read by humans. Invest the time ONCE for screenreaders to understand CSS positioning and read content in a sensible order. Use image recognition to describe pictures (with selectable levels of detail). Let the browser modify colors on the fly for better readability.
Don't spend time and money to solve a problem 100000 Times that could be solved once.
Fuck accessibility.28 -
By far the most stupid email I ever got was a feedback to a documentation paper that I wrote.
The email's author went on a rant for long paragraphs, suggesting how the content should be structured, written, pictures suggestions ("something like a box with arrows" kind of description) only to realize, I guess in the middle of writing the email, that my approach was much more user friendly, easier to understand and to follow.
So, after this looong rant the email basically ends with "I see what you did there; forget what I wrote before. Cheers."
My brain stopped for that day. It couldn't handle it.2
