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Here's my piece of advice for new devs out there:
1 - Pick one language to learn first and stick with it, untill you grasp some solid fundamentals. (Variables, functions, classes, namespaces, scope, at least)
2 - Pick an IDE, and stick with it for now. Don't worry about tools yet. Comment everything you're coding. The important thing is to comment why you wrote it, and not what it does. Research git and start using version control, even when coding by yourself alone.
3 - Practice, pratice and pratice. If you got stuck, try reading the language docs first and see if you can figure it out yourself. If all else fails, then go to google and stackoverflow. Avoid copying the solution, type it all and try to understand it.
4 - After you feel you need to go to the next level, research best practices first, and start to apply them to your code. Try to make it modular as it grows. Then learn about tools, preprocessors and frameworks.
5 - Always keep studying. Never give up. We all feel that we have no idea of what we are doing sometimes. That's normal. You will understand eventually. ALWAYS KEEP STUDYING.9 -
Management:
"We're gonna make our own builder that sets up pre configured files.
So we are gonna get rid again of GIT, because with our system you shouldnt be working over each others files if you keep out of other peoples files."
So they basically are saying, we are going back to no version control because you should all keep to the honor system because our system is better.
I'm fucking leaving...
And possibly leaving a poison pill to boot12 -
No one uses Git, nor any code hosting service, but I'm the Junior.
Yeah okay, fuck you and your fucking siloes.
I won't tolerate lack of version control anymore, I'll be looking for the next "professional opportunity".11 -
We work with about 7 developers at this company with 80 somewhat websites in production.
We edit changes directly trough FTP and we use ctrl+z as version control...
(yes since i started working here I've been demanding git, I'm spearheading it and we are getting there slowly)4 -
Just finished a technical interview for a company that asked me to submit a small app.
I guess when they had written the requirements they had anticipated it to be written as a Webform not as a full MVC application 😂. They had expected me to complete and build this single page app in 2-3 hours not in 14... 🫥 Oops
So here we are reviewing it and asking questions about my setup and what I was trying to do. They were impressed enough with it that one guy even admitted that I might be a better programmer than him. 😳 A very kind compliment, but concerning because he's supposed to be my manager...
All in all got through everything and they want me over to meet the team and see what this shop is all about.
I'm excited, they company is seeing immense growth and I might be able to bring in my expertise to expedite some of it.
Did I mention they use SVN for version control? 😳
They want to get into Git soon but they don't know how to. I guess I'll be leading that cause.3 -
I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.
https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...
My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.
Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.
Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...
We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.
We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.
Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.
The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.
Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.
Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.
Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.
Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.
My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.
He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.
Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.
So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.2 -
I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.
I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …
Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!
After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)
So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂
Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?7 -
In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.
So this happened a while back ..
I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.
Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.
It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.
It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.
By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.
And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.3 -
IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.
You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).
Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.
Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.
At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).
People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".
Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.
I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.
Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.
The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.
Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).
I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.8 -
I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.
Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.
First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?
But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.
"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.
Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.6 -
Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.
It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.
Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.
I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.
At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.1 -
Follow-up on https://devrant.com/rants/5001553/...
How the fuck are Jupyter notebooks so popular in research? Like some dude had an idea to take perfectly good markdown and python code, add a whole lot of transitional properties to make version control impossible, encode it as JSON on the assumption that a human could somehow look at it and make sense of countless escaped characters and base64 encoded data, create dedicated software people need to install in order to read what used to be simple plain text, and think "This. This is what 99% of data researchers will use from now on." And somehow, overwhelming majority of researchers agreed that this extremely inefficient data format is the best there is and they should develop all their tools around it.11 -
for the 3rd time ive tried introducing some version control on a project that really needs it because it has multiple people working on it.
And because the last time my efforts got shut down because in practice people thought it was too much of a hassle to develop locally rather than on the shared development server directly, I made a feature that would let people checkout branches on said server...
Apparently the action of; saving > committing > pushing to your feature branch > merge after aproval, is still too much for people to comprehend; "I think this is too convoluted can't we just keep pushing to the production server to check our work and then commit and push to the master branch"
So I just got pissed and said fuck it, no more git then, I'm not even going to put any effort into changing tooling here anymore, and this is a massive project where we have to manually remove code that isnt ready yet from the staging environment.
Are the people I'm working with just this stupid or am I really overengineering this solution because I think 4 people should not be working on the same file at the same time without any form of version control and just direct upload to FTP.
(and yes, I know I should leave this job already, but social anxiety of starting at a new company is a big obstacle for me)3 -
Can someone, with senior experience in the whole software development process at a large scale company, come talk some sense into our development managers on how you properly run a development company??
The way we do things is wrong in so many ways, but I can't get trough to them, maybe someone with more authority will.
Like im talking about things like, no version control, being totally blindsighted to technical debt, no code review, telling me we shouldnt use 3rd party tools to track issues, tasks, etc.
Are there like intervention companies for this?8
Wow, some guys here have the means to travel to the future!! Cool!! I too want some of that action!