!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Friend: *deletes something from the internet*
"Thank god, now it's gone forever!"

Me: *Laughs in French*
"Hahahaha!"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "No, I'm pretty sure almost everything you put on the internet stays on the internet."

Friend: "ARE YOU STUPID??! The button says fucking DELETE. What else would it to do? Please use your brain for once."

Me: "You realize that text in the button is just a string right?"

Friend: *Looks confused*
"Stop trying to be such a smartass. Why would it be called 'delete' if it doesn't delete? Your logic make no sense whatsoever."

Me: *Makes quick simple app in order to prove my point*

App has 4 buttons:

-Play Music: Shows a picture of a dog

-Stop Music: Starts playing music video of Never gonna give you up

-Close App: Changes the interface to a random color

-Delete App: Pop up that says "The app has been deleted"

Friend: *Installs and tries the app*
"Dude! Did you even test your app before sending me?? Your buttons are broken as hell. None of them works. They all do things they're not supposed to do. How do you even call yourself a programmer? Sorry dude, nothing personal but this app sucks."

Me: *I need a new friend*
*sigh*

Mac: Suddenly turns off
Me: Fuck my code..F***
Mac: No response at all
Me: reset SMC etc etc
Mac: I am dead (no battery detection, dies after 10 min on power adaptor)
Me: Skips a heart beat..(Git, oh yea git)

**Takes Mac to store, After diagnosis**

Apple Freaking Genius (AG): Your Mac has a mother board problem it needs to be replaced.
Me: Hmm what is the problem exactly??
AG: Issues in logic board and some other components.
Me: How much?
AG: Out of warranty so $$$ (60% of original amount)
Me: (wtf?) Really
AG: It's entire motherboard replacement .. bla bla

**Bring it home > open > everything seems ok on multimeter as per circuit diagram > finally finds a voltage drop that is not consistent > minute short circuit > remove > check further > nothing else > reassemble > hit power button > starts fine > freaking battery detected > works fine**

0 $ repair

Fixes two more devices @ 0 $ in friend circle

Builds a raspberry pi backup laptop with 3d printed body..Ubuntu.. you know can't live without a computer

#ThugLife #Engineer

I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Just reached 100+!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(L)Devrant

Your profession changes how you think.
Coding did the same for me. Some good, some bad.

The good:

I know which problems in life are worth trying to solve.

And I'm very good at solving those problems.

I can analyse a situation accurately. I don't get emotional and panic.

I can immediately identify logical flaws in people's thinking.

I can identify biases in others and myself.

The bad:

I tend to follow simple instructions to the letter and rarely improvise based on reality.

When my wife tells me her problem I try to solve it instead of empathizing - which is what she really wants.

I haven't developed street smarts or the ability to convince people with anything other than logic - but people are more emotional than logical.

I'm not good at small talk.

Account guy saw me coding...

account guy: so you type a lot.. how can you remember so much??

me: ??

account guy: I mean there is NO LOGIC in what you do, so you must read these things and type them here... you need to remember a lot.. right??

me: ohh... that... well.. I have very good memory :)

p.s. last line was sarcasm

In unit test
Me: *uses everything I have , writes a program with my own logic, tries to make it better by adding some user friendly features and also documents the whole code*
My Friend:*copies from textbook*

RESULT
ME:9/10
HIM:10/10

"Your code isn't present in the textbook, so I can't say if it'll work but still I've given you marks" -_-
What kinda system is that -_-

"Can you work on this ticket? It's kind of urgent."

-- "OK"

"And could you please not refactor? Just get this done."

-- "Why? What's the issue?"

"The logic is complex. We should not break it."

-- "Erm, that's what the tests are for. So yes, if the need arises, I'll refactor. The tests are my guidelines if the logic breaks or not."

There's a reason we create tests. So let's not hinder code base improvements by some random fear that stuff might break.

If breaks due to refactoring, we'll fix it by adding a valid test case during and then fixing the bug.

If my refactoring does not break the tests, I'll assume the code base is stable.

If your code is untested, then we have a complete different problem.

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

PineScript is absolute garbage.

It's TradingView's scripting language. It works, but it's worse than any language I have ever seen for shoddy parsing. Its naming conventions are pretty terrible, too:

transparency? no, "transp"
sum? no, cum. seriously. cum(array) is its "cumulative sum."

There are other terrible names, but the parser is what really pisses me off.

1) If you break up a long line for readability (e.g. a chained ternary), each fragment needs to be indented by more than its parent... but never by a multiple of 4 spaces because then it isn't a fragment anymore, but its own statement.

2) line fragments also cannot end in comments because comments are considered to be separate lines.

3) Lambdas can only be global. They're just fancy function declarations. Someone really liked the "blah(x,y,z) =>" syntax

4) blocks to `if`s must be on separate lines, meaning `if (x) y:=z` is illegal. And no, there are no curly braces, only whitespace.

There are plenty more, but the one that really got me furious is:

98) You cannot call `plot()`, `plotshape()`, etc. if they're indented! So if you're using non-trivial logic to optionally plot things like indicators, fuck you.

Whoever wrote this language and/or parser needs to commit seppuku.

I was totally in the zone earlier.

Plenty of caffeine, plenty of anger thanks to idiots, rocking out to Amon Amarth and Disturbed, and chewing through a difficult logic problem. It was wonderful.

Then.

Then there was a mandatory all-hands meeting. A mandatory meeting entirely consisting of someone doing a (admittedly decent) presentation on very basic marketing. (Basic as in "This is what ROI is." 🙄) It lasted for about 40 minutes, totally killing my zone and butchering my productivity. I've barely gotten anything done the rest of the day, thanks to that.

On the bright side, I worked out the logic on stickies during the talky-people bits. Maybe I'll be able to write it tomorrow.

Whoever thinks that coding is easy.

Fuck you motherfucker stupid chicken head nugget sized brain faggots. You think all we do is smash keyboards in front of our screen and it poops code and creates beautiful applications? Fuck you in particular.

One of my friend says sitting on computer for whole day is the easiest thing. What the fuck motherfucker.
One fucking string can fuck your life forever. Innumerable hours will be wasted behind one simple fucked up logic. And u shithead say its easy.
Get into my shoes and let me bang your head on the keyboard and we will see how beautifully it poops code.

Stupid people.

A few weeks ago at infosec lab in college

Me: so I wrote the RSA code but it's in python I hope that's ok (prof usually gets butthurt if he feels students know something more than him)

Prof: yeah, that's fine. Is it working?

Me: yeah, *shows him the code and then runs it* here

Prof: why is it generating such big ciphertext?

Me: because I'm using big prime numbers...?

Prof: why are you using big prime numbers? I asked you to use 11, 13 or 17

Me: but that's when we're solving and calculating this manually, over here we can supply proper prime numbers...

Prof: no this is not good, it shouldn't create such big ciphertext

Me: *what in the shitting hell?* Ok....but the plaintext is also kinda big (plaintext:"this is a msg")

Prof: still, ciphertext shows more characters!

Me: *yeah no fucking shit, this isn't some mono/poly-alphabetic algorithm* ok...but I do not control the length of the ciphertext...? I only supply the prime numbers and this is what it gives me...? Also the code is working fine, i don't think there's any issue with the code but you can check it if there are any logic errors...

Prof: *stares at the screen like it just smacked his mom's ass* fine

Me: *FML*

Her: What are you doing over there?
Me: I'm working on cryptographic hash functions
Her: is that really homework?
Me: yes, come look with your two eyes.
Her: ...
Me: crazy stuff, no?
Her: I imagine computer science is really just a lot of boxes and arrows.
Me: *flashback to UML, ERD diagrams, and logic diagrams*
Me: you are not wrong.

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

I ended up quitting my first job for many reasons, but this talk still haunts me:

"our workers need to input this data and they tab a lot because [...]"

Me: "ok... Where do they get the data from?

"A standard model compiled via web, sent via mail and then printed for them."

Me: "..."

Them: "..."

Me: "how about we make the import automatic?"

Them: "but then what will our workers do?"

To this day I am still impacted by this dialog... Not much for the stupidity from a business logic point of view (there are many bad companies, and this is not the only one I met in my career), but rather for the implications our job has and for the fact bs jobs are a thing because we are SO used to the capitalism that the bad guys are the ones removing boring tasks, rather than the shitty system which forces you to do a repetitive and automatable task and which reduces you to a shell doing a job a machine could do... And thanks for the wasted paper/ink, global warming ain't gonna get worse on its own!

So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.

I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months

"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.

A little run down would be:

- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.

- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).

- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.

- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.

- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.

- Indentation is a mess.

- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.

- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.

- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.

Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".

The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.

Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.

Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.

You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.

At an interview, the first round was an online coding round. Two questions, one easy one hard, 90 minutes, easy peasy.

I solved the hard one first.
A bit of good logic, followed MVC pattern, all done. Worked flawlessly.
Submitted code. Online compiler threw up an internal error citing java is an invalid command(jdk not found).
Called the invigilators. What I heard next, I couldn't believe this shit.
"We're not responsible for any errors you may be having. Figure it out yourself"
I was like WTF dude. This is not even a compilation or runtime error!
After a heated discussion, I made him look at the code.
Him - what is all this classes and all? Why haven't you written everything inside the main function?
Me - those are model classes. Those are different helper functions. That is a recursive function to avoid 5 for loops and use divide and conquer. Ever heard of OOP? what kind of person writes a 300 line program inside one function?
Him - no no we write it like that only. Correct this.
Me - I fit everything inside the main function. Still the same error, java not installed. Called the idiot to have a look at it.
Him - yeah your code is wrong.
Me - may I know what's wrong with it? Can you fix it please?
Him - no no we aren't allowed to see the code (he had already read it twice. It was compiling and running perfectly, locally) .
Yeah you solved only 1 problem, you were supposed to solve 2.
Me - yes because the rest of the time I had the pleasure of your company. (It isn't everyday that I see talking buffoons.)

They made a full fucking application in MICROSOFT EXCEL!!!!!!!
who the fuck makes an app in Excel? Though it's used internally, it has over 100 users and Everytime there's an update a new file is sent to all of them by mail. They use different excel files as DBs and tables as sheets. It's even got a fucking UI with check boxes and drop-downs and shit

Now guess what my task is?
Understand that entire application from the Excel files and make a webapp to cater to those requirements.

Fuck documentation, there are bugs in the Excel file and I need to fix the bugs in my app

Some good soul please tell me how must one start analyzing an Excel sheet to understand the logic behind it. Or a tool that magically converts "excel applications" to webapps

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

To the person who architected a system where business logic is encoded to XML within CDATA sections within other XML data inside a 10000 line file that also describes the presentation of this same data:

I hope you meet a violent death. Your suffering should be equal to what developers who had to deal with your perverted shit experienced.

Motherfucker.

In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.

System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.

Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.

And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!

The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.

Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).

This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"

Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.

New to this but here's my rant I suppose. It bothers me how "non-tech" people kind of devalue what tech people do. Like they have zero understanding of it, so you make something in 30 minutes or an hour that took years of building said skills and involved complex logic and understanding of relational data and because it only took you 30 minutes or an hour it must have been "easy". Or the way you are everybody's free tech advisor with family and friends... And things are said like "I'm not good with this stuff, but you're so good with it". For the record nobody is just "great" at technology or coding from birth its been a 2+ decade craft that I've experimented with and learned and put effort into. So taking into consideration all this effort I have put in to understand all this you say you'll never remember to push that button so you'll just ask me again when the problem arises. Yes because its so fun for me to constantly maintain your electronics because you can't bother to remember to push a button.

So this happened about a year ago. I was going bowling with some friends that day. My brother was invited, but he needed to finish a couple of programs for a MATLAB class.

So I drive my friends to the bowling place, then head to where my bro is saying. Once there my brother starts going over the program, he tells me what it's supposed to do and such. I follow along and I'm thinking "yup, this makes sense". That's when he tells me "The logic is fine, but look at what happens when I run it".

The program works fine...

We just stare at the screen, then at each other. "Your welcome" I tell him with a grin.

I am fed up working with unskilled software developers. Or to be more specific, working with people who have no idea of sofware architecture.

Most people I've worked with have simply no idea what they are doing in the broad picture, they can only follow patterns they see and implement their feature in the same way. They can't think about the abstract concepts which should be the foundation of the project.

They fail to write unit tests which are maintainable. They write one fucking test per method which is testing 50 things at the same time, making it often impossible to understand what is being tested.

They think putting stuff in private methods makes their class better and is some kind of separation of concerns.

They write classes and afterwards create interfaces for these classes named {Class}Interface, shoving all the methods into that interface. They think it's good design to do so.

They are unable to think about the reasons why things are done the way they are done and that you don't do stuff for the sake of doing stuff, but to achieve certain goals like interchangeability.

They don't undestand how to separate business logic from the application code.

They have no sense for naming things beautifully. They don't see how naming things is a major part of good software architecture.

They get layer concepts wrong and then create godlike {EntityName}Service classes, which do everything related to a particular entity.

They fail to shape the boundaries within a software project, entangling stuff which should live in individual modules.

All I want is to work in a team with professionals.

So today I basically "lost" the chance to enter this remarkable security StartUp. The dream made true... a couple of Python nice scripts, the logic test that wasn't that big, everything was going well.

I met the CEO, damn! He seems to be a great dude. But suddenly, a wild co-founder appeared.

The dude started to talk about money and how he didn't perceive me as a Senior developer (not even if my results were telling him the oppositive); he ended up with: you seemed to be Mid-advance.
I was like: Ok, I understand. Wasn't that big because I knew that I could have demonstrated my skills.

Then he asked about my salary expectations, I answered to him my realistic expectations, that to be honest, it wasn't a lot of damn money! Because, I really was expecting a chance to learn more, have bigger challenges, bring value, etc.

He said: Okay let me check this with my partner. But, that was a week ago.
Anyway, today I received an email from the CEO, with the typical apologize telling me that the vacancy will be paused by the moment.

Oh, I didn't mention that one friend of mine is working there and he told me a couple of hours ago that they have hired a Junior developer because he was willing to accept what they wanted to pay him. Puff it broke my heart, but I wish him luck because even though I was dying to be on that security StartUp, I’m not at the point to accept a misery of money to work harder, I just felt frustrated with that stingy guy.

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.

The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.

The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.

The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.

What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.

An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.

Battery consumption in 6 months.
Logic vs Apple.

This is what you get when you fill a consumer electronic company with a shit load of designers and 0 qualified electrical engineer.

Question!

I am 26, and recently diagnosed with autism. An incredibly late diagnosis due to my absolutely amazing ability to keep everything internal.. It has caused my countless headaches and heartaches over the years and its good to finally understand what it is thst makes me how I am...

I am also aware that IT goes hand in hand with autism due to our thought process being so 'logical' and our acceptance of failure is.... Er... Not the best. But we also have the stubborness/determination to keep going, learn what it is we did wrong and improve upon it.

So my question really is, are many of you on the spectrum also? If so, are there any coping strategies that you can share with me/everyone who reads this?

By coping I don't mean just dealing with it, but I mean in the workplace. I've never had a job formally in IT because I never did any qualifications in it. Rebuilt my first pc at age 7 and been hooked since.

I have always been a mechanic because again, logic reasons.

I'm currently in contact with an organisation here in Norway called 'Unicus' who are specialised in employing people on the spectrum, specifically in the IT sector... Have any of you heard of them? They seem promising to me

Thanks for reading guys and please feel free to delete this if this really isn't the place for it, I just feel that within this community there are more of us and I would like to open the door for communication

Legacy code.

Honestly though, this is some of the better legacy code I've worked with at this company. It's a nifty alert system wherein you can trigger sending messages to subscribers of that alert via whatever means (phone/email) they've entered.

I'll save you the technical analysis of its internals, but suffice to say it's actually pretty nice, with good separation of concerns, internal logic hidden away, dead-simple public interface, etc. documentation is kinda crap, but it exists (!), so that's a nice change.

but.

For some unknown and bloody bizarre reason, the thing breaks when a user wants both sms AND email notifications. Either by themselves work totally fine, but both together? nonono. Email alerts give ArgumentErrors, so something internal isn't correct, and SMS alerts complain about uninitialized Twilio::Error constants.

but.
they both work fine otherwise?

also, the two notification preferences aren't stored on the same object anywhere. if a user wants both, the user creates two AlertContact objects with different info, and when performed, the Alert basically iterates over these and does its thing for each, so there is no knowledge shared between them. totally should work the same regardless.

idfgi.

ALSO.
AND THIS PART REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

WHEN THERE'S AN ERROR, THIS THING DOESN'T LOG IT. IT STRINGIFIES THE ERROR OBJECT (basically just extracting the message) AND INSERTS THAT INTO THE DATABASE INSTEAD. WHAT THE CRAP.

So, I don't get a stack trace, line number, or anything. just the basic error message. instead of my alert text. because of course that makes sense and totally helps debugging.

aklsjfak;sldfj.
legacy code.

Manager: Here's the design for the next feature, we're ready to hand it over to the consultant

FullStackClown: Uh... okay... is it spec'd out with requirements?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Well, already look at this design and user flow, did you consider what happens when <insert edge case X here>, <insert edge case Y here>, or <insert edge case Z here>? How is the consultant going to know what to put in for business logic if you don't even know or define it yourself?

Manager: Huh?

FullStackClown: Sigh... yeah, I'm too busy right now to be a kindergarten teacher, come back in a few days once you understand how your own feature is supposed to work

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

"We need you to give 110% so that the total is greater than the sum of the parts... Eg: 1 + 1 > 2"
You're addressing a team who use logic to make you money. What the fuck are we supposed to do with this shit?
1 + 1 > 2?
false
Fuck off.

So I've decided if I am invited to a school career day the what I'll do is this.

1. Start by handing out one of those logic puzzles that are like Sally lives 2 houses down from Bill, Bill is 3 houses away from Maggie where does Jerry live type of thing. Then I'll tell the kids they have 10 minutes to figure it out.

2. After about three minutes I'll tell them that they also need to figure out where Jerry lives and not give them enough information to figure that out.

3. 5 minutes in I'll start asking them why it is taking so long, and it shouldn't be that hard. I'll also ask about where Phil lives who was never mentioned before.

4. At 7 minutes I'll look for anyone who might be figuring it out and tell them there is a much more important high priority problem I need them to solve and give them a new puzzle and tell them I expect them both to be done on time.

5. At nine minutes I'll start yelling at them that they must not be that good and why they haven't finished yet if any of them complain I'll tell them they are just dumb.

6. At ten minutes I'll ask them to turn it in and then immediately throw it in the trash and tell them that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and tell them they did it wrong.

I figure that is a pretty good representation of what working in software engineering is like.

Is it just me, or does nobody read their fucking email? Especially when I try explain how a bug isn't trivial to solve because its based on some shitty design decision, that the managers made, that is practically the core of the app. If YOU cant understand the logic with me explaining it to you in plain FUCKING ENGLISH, than how in the name of baby FUCKING jesus, do you expect me to communicate that to the most complicated machines that man has ever built?!? What in the actual fuck do you even do here?!? I could do your job blind-folded, with terminal access to the db, while a monkey was flinging shit at me!

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

How can you defend your ugly unstructured mess of a PR, when every spit-droplet infused spray of words from your mouth is full of syntax errors?

How can you call yourself a developer without being aware of basic logic? I ain't got no tolerance for double negations, not not true is just true, you doltish twat.

WHEN YOU TALK THERE IS A CLOUD OF RED SQUIGGLY LINES IN THE AIR FLOATING AROUND YOUR HEAD.

I mean what the fuck is up with eggcetera? Why are you just swapping out letters? What has the little ligature t in & ever done to you? Do I have to fucking replace & with 🥚 so your word diarrhea makes sense again?

NO. JUST PLEASE... STOP TALKING. YOU'RE RAPING LANGUAGE, AND IT WAS ALREADY BEATEN DEAD.

Unlike me, you have a degree in computer science... but how, how the fuck did you pass? How did neither your tongue nor code get stuck in a linter?

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS STILL: "YOU DON'T NEED TO LEARN WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED WITH SCHOOL" ... "WHAT DOES IT MATTER, IT WORKS, RIGHT?"

NO, IT'S NOT RIGHT.

You're lucky I love refactoring.

I'll start with a medical grade steel scalpel and a long sharp hook. Maybe I can clean up this brain a little. See if the tests turn green if I cut some of this gray matter away... plenty of unreachable statements, so many unnecessary loops...

Might have to start from scratch.

the effort to get girls, and children for that matter into programming has been terrible. I never thought I could find something worse than code.org, but here it is: SmartGurlz (because what could be smarter than spelling your own gender wrong, right?). this was on shark tank and this lady was making robots to try to get girls into programming. they pretty much control dolls on wheels by means of scratch. it's terrible. first of all, how the fuck is that profitable? when a little girl wants to play dolls, what kind of girl wants to *program* it first. jesus, no kid wants that.

second, this girls who code thing makes me barf. the thought process for many organizations trying to push girls to code is "hmm, if we isolate girls and give them lower standards, then maybe they'll decide to go into a male-dominated industry," because, fuck logic right? idiocy is dreadful. lastly, what I hate most about so many of the girls coding organizations, is the fact that they have to embrace the stereotypes. almost every single one cares about "feelings" or something similar. its bullshit.

and don't get me wrong, women should have equal opportunity, but pushing them into stem fields isn't good. bias in the workplace is what we should be talking about, or other topics like women being paid less. trying to make girls interested in programming is complete bullshit, let them do what they want.

back to "SmartGurlz," I looked them up and they confirmed what I expected. the first thing I see? not anything related to programming whatsoever, but different dolls wearing different outfits. girls deserve something better, and shouldn't have to deal with organizations trying to push them into something they don't want to do.

Put away the keyboard. Think about what you're going to do, chart it out, work through the logic and then, when the entire construct is before you, you start typing.

Yes it will take longer, you're a junior, enjoy that nobody expects you to do miracles (yet) and take the time, you'll get it back when you're so used to working through logical problems that it happens on its own as soon as you hear about the problem.

Cutting corners and "hacking a quick solution" without fucking over the entire system is an art form. Before you do art learn your damn craft.

I always feel insecure when i push my code to github as public repo.

Like what if my code is so far from standard.

What if i showed a very stupid logic.

I am very insecure when pushing my code to public repos.

I recently ranted so much about languages but here it goes

JS we need to talk. BECAUSE YOU GOT FAT AND UGLY STUPID BITCH! Dumb piece of bloatware. What even is your problem? Depending on a library for strpad and then blow up like Steve jobs ego. Bastardized fuckfest. I used to like you bro and then you screw me over!
It's like you fuck my wife while I try to fix your car. Why can't you even be usefully on your own anymore? I'd be richer than bill gates if I get a dollar for every damn framework people pull from their asses. Are you writing this fuck while shitting so you can compare colors of your outcome?

Normalize the fucking base, don't add to the bukkakke! bitch is drowning already. Why is everyone jerking of to react and angular? When have YOU written something in vanilla the last time? Why even bother? Remove the core and hardcore every damn framework into the browsers. Guess that saves you 200kb. Oh wait I forgot that's about unminified jQuery.

Now I need to load about 2GB of dependencies, some creating code that puts code in my code to load code out of my code which was generated out of something that remotely resembles JS so every browser is able to execute my fancy shit. But hey, it's fast. And of course there are the fanboys. You are worse than apple fags. You sample your own jizz with your friends in a wine glass. there was a Time it was bad practice to mix logic and view. Now you made it mandatory. "Browser does the rendering" ofc you imbecile pile of fuck don't show me a damn preloader for 1 picture and 20 lines of text. Who fucked your brain so hard?

So react seems to be the cool kid now, then I tell someone I know angular it's like showing up in a pikachu onsie to a formal dinner with the queen.

I used to love you girl. I loved how we could dirty things together. Now you are like a pig. Please loose weight bby the sight of you disgusts me nowadays

Had a 1:1 with my boss last night and together we figured out a tricky bug related to my PR. However, either my PR or that bug patch broke a tangentially-related test. Queue my usual exhaustion, and I gave up trying to fix it.

This morning, I'm looking at it and nothing makes sense. My change should not have broken the test. So I reran the controller's tests, and... they all pass?

What is logic.

Good thing, though; that test leads to a few rabbit holes I haven't even begun exploring yet.

Oh, never mind. It broke again.
Ergh, here we go. 😔

Since fucking when did "bare metal" mean just running on an OS?? At a conference and literally everyone is like "we got kubernetes running on bare metal", got super excited for a bit because just the idea of that sounds amazing but they're using it as slang for "basically not in a container or vm."

Nothing exciting at all. Now we're patting ourselves on the back for getting software working without it being preconfigured as a container or a VM image. No one knows how to do anything any more. MUCH too much abstraction going on.

I guess it keeps me more employable, but the state of the world from a developer standpoint is just sad.

(For reference, this is what the first sentence of "Bare Metal" looks like on wikipedia "In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.")

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

Client support ticket: we printed the ID cards without leading 0’s can you fix it with software?
Me: unfortunately we cannot because the ID number can be any length. ID 123, 0123 and 00123 can exist. What barcode would 123 go to?
Client: this is ridiculous we will cancel our contract.
Me: i’m sorry we can’t correct for a mistake on your end.
(Side note: I know allowing 0123 and 00123 is dumb but my team didn’t design the business logic)

I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.

Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...

Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.

It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.

This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.

My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.

“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”

Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....

Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.

Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

I got told once that "You don't need pay if you love your job" - what kind of bullshit logic is that? ( I work as a volunteer programmer on a community project, but the game is for-profit and making a fair amount ). People these days...

Testing hell.

I'm working on a ticket that touches a lot of areas of the codebase, and impacts everything that creates a ... really common kind of object.

This means changes throughout the codebase and lots of failing specs. Ofc sometimes the code needs changing, and sometimes the specs do. it's tedious.

What makes this incredibly challenging is that different specs fail depend on how i run them. If I use Jenkins, i'm currently at 160 failing tests. If I run the same specs from the terminal, Iget 132. If I run them from RubyMine... well, I can't run them all at once because RubyMine sucks, but I'm guessing it's around 90 failures based on spot-checking some of the files.

But seriously, how can I determine what "fixed" even means if the issues arbitrarily pass or fail in different environments? I don't even know how cli and rubymine *can* differ, if I'm being honest.

I asked my boss about this and he said he's never seen the issue in the ten years he's worked there. so now i'm doubly confused.

Update: I used a copy of his db (the same one Jenkins is using), and now rspec reports 137 failures from the terminal, and a similar ~90 (again, a guess) from rubymine based on more spot-checking. I am so confused. The db dump has the same structure, and rspec clears the actual data between tests, so wtf is even going on? Maybe the encoding differs? but the failing specs are mostly testing logic?

none of this makes any sense.
i'm so confused.

It feels like i'm being asked to build a machine when the laws of physics change with locality. I can make it work here just fine, but it misbehaves a little at my neighbor's house, and outright explodes at the testing ground.

TL;DR: At a house party, on my Phone, via shitty German mobile network using the GitLab website's plain text editor. Thanks to CI/CD my changes to the code were easily tested and deployed to the server.

It was for a college project and someone had a bug in his 600+ lines function that was nested like hell. At least 7 levels deep. Told him before I went to that party it's probably a redefined counter variable but he wouldn't have it as he was sure it was an error with the business logic. Told him to simplify the code then but he wouldn't do that either because "the code/logic is too complex to be simplified"... Yeah... what a dipshit...
Nonetheless I went to the party and He kept debugging. At some point he called me and asked me to help him the following day. Knowing that the code had to be fixed anyways I agreed.
I also knew I wouldn't be much of a help the next day due to side effects of the party, so I tried looking at this shitshow of a function on my phone. Oh did I mention it was PHP, yet? Yeah... About 30 minutes and a beer later I found the bug and of course it was a redefined counter variable... My respect for him as a dev was already crumbling but it died completely during that evening

Isn't it just nice to throw away hours of work because you were given wrong requirements?

I worked late last night to finish a project with an incoming deadline, and for what? That's right, for fucking nothing. Hours wasted. Just because I was told the form was to be submitted to an endpoint that I would receive later on.

Turns out that what I actually need to do is embed some form from a third-party service. So the form that I already implemented (with styles and logic) isn't needed. What's worst, I have to redo all the styles to match this embed form.

Thank you so much for that. 🖕Never again will I work late. I should have known better by now...

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

That moment when you struggle and write an amazing backend logic and your manager only looks at the frontend/UI and tells you it is okay. The struggle doubles when you try and explain him the backend logic and he just ignores you...what a day!!(No offense to amazing frontend developers out there)

The great thing about coding is, every problem can be solved with logic. And the simplest solution is often the best one.
Often when I don't know what to do, I just keep thinking about what I want to have and break down what I need for that and in the end I always come to a good solution. And it gets easier from time to time.

Just had an old coworker from a previous job send me some stuff for a php script he was having issues with.

There was too much glory in what he was trying to do: mixing php inside of jquery code, not using strict types would have prevented like 10 issues he was having on his script on another portion, mixing headers, weirdly named variables, poorly constructed, reused db connections, 0 oop or proper dependency management in his code, horrible use of sessions and cookies, O (n²) logic all over the place.

But the cake.....are y'all ready for it? It was code screenshots, not even of just the section, no, the full page, from a windows machine (to make it better he is hosting the application on an IIS server and his configuration was not properly set) but I digress, back to the cake:

He was writing his code inside of wordpad :P

FUCKING WORDPAD

I just politely told him that I was busy at the moment and happily ignored him. Dude is not a good person to begin with imo, for example, he brought the subject of homosexuality during one of our talks after he saw me talking to my bf, who just so happens to be gay, his statement was "I do not understand how there can be gay people when there are women that are so hot"

My comeback was "I do not understand how we can be heterosexual when there are some really attractive dudes out there, see how stupid your logic sounds? attractiveness is not the basis for homosexuality ye dipstick" he let it go after that, but close minded people like that are not really my cup of tea.

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

FFUUUuucccckkk me sideways. So I decided to look into USB type-c's power delivery and alt modes. Cause I kinda want to make an adapter card to run my displays over a single cable. TLDR of the rest: USB-C has some huge capabilities which noone is interested in using since its way to complex to handle for what its worth in the end.
Now PD alone is kinda ok to deal with since a lot of powerbanks use it and some hobby guys documented how to work with it. I find it really odd thou that you NEED to use a dedicated IC for using the configuration chanel to negotiate how much power you can draw. Why the USB standard didnt use some simple 5V low speed signalling? Also the standard says that you only have to implement 5v 0.6A with every other power level being optional. (This is also true for cables. Most manufacturers use only the USB 2.0 standard for them and brag about how fast type-C is. ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) )
Now to the alt modes. These motherfuckers are a real shitshow to deal with. First you need a Mux to deal with USB-C's two way insertion, so your signals wont get flipped. Next thing is that you have four lanes at your disposal in alt mode. Which you can either use for four Display Port Lanes or two DP lanes and two USB 3.0 lanes. (You always get USB 2.0) Now you may think that there would be one simple chip to do it all? Nope you need atleast two at the price of 6$ each. One for PD and one for Alt modes. Both are very hard to solder (QFN, 0.5 mm pitch 40+ pins) TI ended up being the only one with a decent offering of IC's that do what I need. As for working with them, you would think that you just slap a simple MCU on there that communicates over I2C or SPI to configure the chips? Nope! You program the chips memory from which it configures itsself. And the programming is done with some TI tool which gives me no idea as to how you can handle everything whith no control logic behind it.
Looking into alternative IC's leaves me with cypress semi. And their documentation is basically a total mess. I wanna know what that chip is good for and what I need to do to make it work. I dont care about technical details mixed with marketing jargon nobody understands. And I really despise that I have to register just to download a datasheet. Especially since there is no info about it on the main page.
And this whole rant hasnt even touched the topic that USB-C only uses DP and nothing else. So you better hope that you have DP++ so you can use a passive conversion.
This was my Ted Talk about USB-C. Some info in it may be subject to my stupidity and errors as it currently is 02:15 in the morning and I need some sleep.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).

Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...

I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.

The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.

He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...

I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?

End rant.

TL;DR - Girlfriend wanted to learn coding, I might have scared her off.

Today, my girlfriend said she wants to learn coding.
Me: why?
She: well, all these data science lectures are recommending Python and R.
Me: Ok. But, are you interested in coding?
She: No, but I think I have to learn.
Me: Hmm.. coding requires a clear thought process, and we should tell the computer exactly what needs to be done.
She: I think I can do that.
Me: Okay... then tell the computer to think and give a random number between 1 to 10.
She: I will use that randint function. (She has basic knowledge in C)
Me: Nope. You write your own logic to make the computer think.
She: What do you mean?
Me: If I were you... Since it is just a single digit number.. I would capture the current time and would send the last digit of milliseconds @current time.
She: Oh yeah, that's cool. Understood! I will try...
" " "
We both work in same office.. so, we meet up for lunch

" " "

I didn't ask about it, but she started,
She: Hmm, I thought about it, but I was not able to think of any solution. May be its not my cup of tea.

I felt bad for scaring her off... :(

Anyway, what are some other simple methods to generate random numbers like OTPs. I am interested in simple logics, which you have thought of..not the Genius algorithms we have in predefined libraries.

What do you do when another dev overwrites/changes your working code without telling you, only because s/he cannot understand how your code works?

And your code was working fine, mind you, no bugs or anything, and is following recommended guidelines/standards. It's just that this other dev has a different coding style and prefers to rewrite everything his/her way even if it means breaking up otherwise sound logic.

Just got rejected for an internship position. They saying you are slightly lesser for what our intern possess. Upon insisting they told that both my "skill set" and "logic" is not up to the mark. I am depressed

This app allows you view the json file your computer upload to Microsoft.
But to open it, you have to join the insider program and agree to upload more private data.
To know what data Microsoft spying on me, I have to agree to let Microsoft spying me willingly.
What kind the logic is that?😤

//Random Mr. Robot thought//
So this picture and this quote in general has been in my mind quite recently. The first time I saw this scene it just passed through my mind as just a wierd quirk of elliot. But upon further thinking, I question that given Elliot is someone who specializes in network security in a sense. A part of which focuses on finding exploits in networks or even software in general( basically finding the worst in them). And the more I think about that,the more I come to realisation that just like most programmers mix together logic in their life in dealing with people, this scene stands out as an example of just that happening with Elliot and what perhaps, makes him such a good hacker. Perhaps we could all learn from this, or perhaps I'm just looking too much into this. Eh.

I think I just blew my own mind here.

Look at this:

Class SomeClass
{
_call($functionName, $arguments)
{
return call_user_func(array('SomeClass','uselessMethod'), 'method');
}

method($foo)
{
return new Adapter($foo)->execute($this);
}

uselessMethod()
{
return $this->method(__FUNCTION__);

}

}
so __FUNCTION__ resolves to
Caller:

You can run that code, whether you comment out uselessMethod, or not.

Adapter is a function that looks for what class to call depending on a database value
and execute the call.

So api basically uses a chain call to do stuff like this in controllers, here's how
I call the above:

$someObject = (new Class($object))->uselessMethod()->doSomething()->doSomethingElse();

But like, eventually my code matured to where all those methods in the chain call have the same one line return that calls my adapter to find the logic to run.

So, basically, I can now have a class with headless function calls that calls a directory of other classes, that are all defined in a contract somewhere. So as long as those classes
all adhere to the contract, it will never return an error.

I can't think of any reason to do this, other than my setup, and I have a sneaky feeling,
as dirty as this trick is, that there's a bad reason my code has come to being able to do this.

Maybe wrong strategy pattern from the beginning?

I'm sure it'll come to me like 3 days from now..

Everywhere you go, you find these memes where developers are skeptical of their work. Things like "It works. I don't know how. It doesn't work. I don't know how.". Don't you guys think this is a huge problem? And people say that their programming language is the best, because preference. But isn't this happening because our tools suck?

Yes the problems maybe inherently complex but at least we should be able to figure out the logic behind the snipper and reason about it.

Haven't really experienced it, but they say Haskell and the likes are great at this and it must be true because it's backed by mathematical properties and laws, not " experience".

So the rant here is, wish we had better tools in the mainstream that allowed us to enjoy absolute faith in at least what we have written, regardless of the fact that we understood the problem in the domain.

Tired of reading spaghetti code written by your team mates?

Sit right next to them and ask them to write unit tests for that code.

Smash their head on the keyboard everytime they have to think longer than 10 seconds on how to test a specific logic.

Strangle them with any wire you find nearby till they agree to break up that spaghetti code unless they already started within that 10 second time frame.

When the exercise ends, tell them this is what refactoring is and ask them to pass on the knowledge.

Dear client:
You have to think this is like building a house, so you have to spend time doing some serious thinking, so you come up with a (somewhat) good vision of what you want and what could possible change in the future... let me give you an example: let's say we were building a house and we are very close to finishing it, so you come up with the great idea of putting the kitchen where the living room is, and the bathroom in the second floor where the TV room was... if that happens, then I would tell you to go fuck yourself.
See dear client... there are pipes, wiring, and all sorts of stuff you don't see, that makes a house be a house... apply the same logic to building software and we'll be on the same page more often.
PS: I appreciate your business

SQL Rule 1. Always assume there are external processes that might affect your data. (for instance, triggers).
SQL Rule 2. In Denormalised data, never execute logic on dependant table values, always copy from the parent.
SQL Rule 3. When Denormalised data schemas are created the DBA knows what they are doing.
SQL Rule 3.1. If DBA knows what they is doing then according to Rule 1 there is no problem with adding in some triggers to maintain data clones as they are created.
SQL Rule 4. If you don't like or agree with triggers, deal with it. They are a first class tool in a first class RDBMS. In a multi-app or service environment there may be many other external processes massaging your data
SQL Rule 5. If all previous rules are not broken and the system has been running efficiently for many years DO NOT complain that there are triggers in the database that are doing and have been doing the same process that you just butchered (by violating Rule 1 and 2) in your makeshift "hello world, look what I can do from my phone" angular BS when the rest of the users are still relying on the existing runtime app.
SQL Rule 6. If you turn my triggers off, you sure as hell better turn them back on!

Android development:
- read the official documentation
- implement the logic in your app using what you learned
- find out that at least one method is always deprecated
- read the updated API and, as always, check out your loyal friend Stack Overflow.

Time for a soap box rant.

I just found this in one of our projects. I've simplified the example to make it more anonymous.

When I see code like this it automatically means there is a lack of attention to enumerations and/or understanding of what they are.

One may argue that in a certain execution of code it's a minor performance hit and therefore insignificant. It's still a performance hit. Furthermore, it takes even less time to do it the right way than it does to do it the wrong way.

Every one of these lines will enumerate the list from the beginning to try and find that one element you're interested in. Big O notation, people.

Throw that crap into a dictionary or hashset or similarly applicable data structure with direct reads at the beginning of your logic so that it only gets enumerated ONCE when the data structure instance is created. Then access it however many times you want.

Soap box rant over.

* How I solve a problem*

"Okay, it seems to be interesting, OK think solve it generally"

*Solved the problem manually

"Okay pseudo code is /do this and that/ break it and write Algo.
Seems like it will work,
Making all sense
Okay let's code"

*Wrote in IDE

" Hmm compile and execute"

*Expected output : Hey you!
*Actual output : F you!
Me: What the hell

"Uhh! Just gonna apply brute force"

*Somehow got the actual output = expected output

"I knew, it gonna solve it but how it worked?"

*Thinking
*Thinking....
*Thinking and it's 2 am

"Oh! I'm done, I'm going to sleep"

*4 am, while lucid dreaming

"That's how that thing worked, I got it"

*Relieved
*Next day using the logic dreamt of
*No matter how much surreal it is
*It didn't work

Me : F U!!!
..
..
...
(to be continued)

Damnit! Every time! Our UI Dev asks us to change the API every time he wants something different!

The API is backend -> business logic. You don't change your business according to what fucking color you want on your site!

Sad part is since he's senior I don't want to tell him off

HR logic: You know how to write simple bash scripts and you have "expertise" in programming = You are our next kernel/hypervisor developer!

Girl, I do not even know what a hypervisor is.

Jesus Christ on a crutch!
You don't fucking use try and excepts everywhere in place of actual logic! For once in your Goddamn miserable life, I need you to actually think through what you're doing instead of mindlessly typing code away at your computer, you fucking King Shit of Turd Mountain!

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY EVERYTHING KEEPS BREAKING!?

BECAUSE YOU'RE FUCKING REFERENCING VARIABLES BEFORE THEY'RE ASSIGNED, AND THEN WRAPPING IT UP IN A TRY AND EXCEPT! YOU DON'T FUCKING DO THAT! Think through what you're doing!!!!

The shit you're pulling off here is as useful as a chocolate teapot!

need advice on integrating .t3d file support in c++ engine
hey, been stuck trying to figure out how to get .t3d file support working in our custom game engine, which is all written in c++. it's turning out to be a lot trickier than expected and i'm kinda hitting a wall here. the documentation on .t3d itself is pretty much nonexistent and what's out there is either outdated or too vague to be of any real use. i've tried a few things based on general file parsing logic in c++ but keep running into issues with either reading the files correctly or integrating the data into the engine in a way that actually works. it feels like i'm missing something fundamental but can't pin down what it is. has anyone here gone through this process before or has any experience with .t3d files? i could really use some advice on how to approach this, or even just some resources that explain the format in detail. also, if there are any common pitfalls or things to watch out for when adding new file format support to a game engine, i'd appreciate the heads up. thanks in advance for any help, feeling pretty stuck and any guidance would be a huge help.

Why is it what so many developers think that they are the sole genius surrounded by idiots and completely lack in interpersonal skills or the ability to see other people's arguments as valid? Honestly, with some people it's like working with an emotionally stunted teenager. I literally spoke to someone yesterday who thinks it's impossible to come to a compromise or agreement about anything unless there is a third party to arbitrate and mindlessly insists on his own way in literally every disagreement, even after admitting his logic is faulty. It's like watching a spotty 17 year old argue about politics online I swear it.

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!!

'Hey I found a bug in your code, it's probably a typo, see here.'

Me: Oh right, yeah. How stupid of me. Thanks, I'll push it.

'It's okay. You can push it or I can do it too after you push the changes we just discussed. I actually simplified one of your methods.'

Me: You, what... ?
(You crammed multiple lines in a single line with your stupid as fuck, rigid constructs, removing my error handling, loosely coupled service, in the name of simplification?)

' Yeah it's just four lines in a single function now, no need to call the function again and again.'

Me: (No... Just no. This totally undos whatever little I could do to avoid supporting your idiotic object in the first place.)
Oh... okay, we'll see. I'll let you know.

What life.
Life in a company full of ignorant, inflated egos is no joke.

Details:
I created a service that reads a configuration file and returns the configuration. This person needs five entries for his app logic. He collected them in a object. Quite alright. Except that the class prototype is shitty. I, like a normal person, made my service return a value based on input. I was asked to incorporate this awful object so that I can return the five entries together, which is awful because the service is not supposed to know about how the entries are clubbed. It should most certainly not know about the data members of the object!

Fuck you ios,storyboad,xibs,xcode. FUCK OFF!! YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES. Literally giving me migrane with your fucking ass constraints!! Fuck you xcode for not having a terminal. Ios is utterly bullshit. Has fucking all kind of devices that I have to set constraint. Fuck you macos. You are slower than a snail. How on earth do you take so much time to build!!
Width, height, constraints, my ass! What is this fucking logic bro. Fuck you apple for making so many device of different sizes and then hiring us to set constraints. Warning warning warning oh what a load of crap!
I would rather die than set your fucking ass constraints.

Recently i had a small talk with someone working in the banking sector . When that person acknowledged what i do for a living , she started to be a little bit passive-agressive .
Her:"You know someday , sooner than later , a guy like you is going to create something like artificial intelligence to replace all the devs in the world . Ha ha ha ! And your golden age is going to end . "
Me:"So you think this guy is going to create a smart program , software or platform , that will create software from what ? "
Her:" We will write the specs directly in the program and we will get the software after !"
Me:"And what if the specs are impossible, from logical point of view. "
Her:" Well there will be some rules and you will need to respect them !"
Me: "And people need to learn the logic of these rules?"
Her: " Yes a little bit of training!"
Me:" We already have that !"
Her: " We have ?! "
Me: " Is called .... CODING !"
Her: **silence **
(I remembered the burn from a comic -- forgot the name-- but GOD it felt good !)
Why some people hate us ?

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

What could be more annoying than signing out of all accounts to add a new one because I've reached the threshold. This logic is shit!

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

management logic.

dev : calling api on every product scroll is a stupid idea. we shouldn't do it. what if user has 100s of products bought?
mgmt : it isn't a practical scenario. in prod, we checked the data and we rarely have customers with more than 20 products
dev : 😮🤷‍♂️

dev : this is a rare issue that only happens for very old devices from this specific manufacturer. even manufacturers have acknowledged this.
mgmt : we don't care. fix it, as per data this error has been logged for more than 12 times (from 1 user only)
dev : 😮😢

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant