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Having PHP as my most useful skill.
I know various other languages, but they're either too exotic for professional use, or my knowledge about them doesn't have the same depth as with PHP.
People joke about how awful PHP is, and it's not entirely true. The incongruous stuff such as confusing parameter ordering can be fixed with libraries. And PHP7 fixed a lot of the ugly stuff. A good dev can certainly write structured, readable, performant PHP code.
But there is a real hard limit. PHP is missing more complex type definitions present in other languages. A weak type system is like building stuff with popsicle sticks and bits of duct tape, it works fast and perfectly fine for small projects, but the lack of strictness is a problem when you have thousands of classes intertwined in all kinds of complex factory, service and repository patterns. And the simple type hints are still newish and fully optional, which means a lot of people don't use them.
So I regret getting stuck in this self reinforcing loop, where I learn more about a very imperfect language through employment, and keep rolling into jobs using that skill because it's what I'm most experienced with.16 -
Saying yes to people who want a website for $100.
I've learned my lesson, all brand new websites now start at $1000.9 -
Add functions inside of jquery.min.js file just because im too lazy to add script source to html file6
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Not getting into linux/foss an dumping windows/other proprietary bullshit earlier. The friends I've made through this world, the passion, the ideology behind it...
I fucking wish I'd have found out about this at a way earlier age or even begin raised with those values.8 -
Not meeting any good mentors. Not meeting any good colleagues. Not attending any good dev classes.
I have self taught everything. After my uni kicked out, I founded my own work and working since then. Couldn't hire any great talent that can guide me with the pay I can afford.2 -
Being naive enough to assume I would have time to come back and "fix that later" - oh and also that I would still know exactly what "that" was and how my own code worked with zero documentation.1
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My biggest regret: Going to talk to my boss that I want more responsibilities. Now I am an underpaid boss of 7 people, and the sadest part is, that I have no time for coding anymore 😠4
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The 5 stages of project management:
1 - the Mission:
Receive a project
2 - the Vision:
Over confidence and optimistic time estimation. Tell people how quick you can finish it.
3 - the Climax:
Adding unnecessary features. Try to be innovative. Think different. Feeling like a Rockstar.
4 - the Bargain:
Does not aware deadline is not far away. Reverse all unnecessary or impractical moomshot features. A bit stressed
5 - the Embarrassment:
Unpredicted obstacles or incidents. Late delivery or fail. Feel like a loser.1 -
Wasting so much time on gaming instead of learning software development when I was just starting out5
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I regret that I didn't start learning to code before I went to university and that I never had Computer Science/Programming classes before in school (which is not really my fault but I always wished for this)7
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Not learning data structures and algorithms. Not learning programming languages. Actually not learning anything to answer during a job interview.
I am more of a learn-while-you-do kind of guy. I never learn anything, instead just do it. Interviewers think I am useless because I know nothing. But I can get a job done, any kind of job done. I have no learning period, I can start working from first day in a all new language, in a all new IDE, in a all new OS.
I know nothing, and I learn nothing. I am a problem solver. You got a problem, I can solve it.6 -
Taking several years before doing dev work as a full time job.
I really should have just dove in earlier.
Plus I always wondered what I would have gained from getting that shiny piece of paper (degree), but I guess I’ll never know. -
Got an assignment for my OOP class, looked at it, laughed, "haha this is baby stuff I could code this by farting on the keyboard"
Wrote 400 lines of code without debugging
🙃.... Why do I do this to myself?3 -
My biggest dev regret is that I did not intervene when we decided to use WP for a huge website.
1 year after going live I had to add new features and translations; imagine the PITA-level!
Young me was too reluctant.2 -
- How do you think, could you port our app to iOS?
- Never did iOS apps, but I will learn and try, maybe I will became iOS dev
Fuck, I'm still supporting it
Dear Android devs, never come to the dark side! It's a nightmare4 -
My biggest regret is the same as my best decision ever made.
The company I work for specializes in performing integrations and migrations that are supposed to be near impossible.
This means a documented api is a rare sight. We are generally happy if there even IS an (internal) api. Frequently we resort to front-end scraping, custom server side extensions and reverse-engineered clients.
When you’re in the correct mindset it’s an extreme rush to fix issues that cannot be fixed and help clients who have lost most hope. However, if your personal life is rough at the moment or you are not in a perfect mental state for a while it can be a really tough job.
Been here for 3+ years and counting. Love and hate have rarely been so close to each other. -
My biggest regret working for a company that is not willing to buy decent dev machine when they actually can afford it.
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My biggest regret:
To have waited so long to really start doing what I've always loved...
Now I'm 29 and back to internship :P4 -
Using computers 12 hours a day since age 8, but learning to develop only in the past year.
I love video games too much. -
Didn't reviewed the migration file and ran the script on production which altered the column from LONGTEXT to TINYTEXT and truncated all the data. 😞2
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Working too fucking much.
When I don't, I feel like I'm letting my team down.
I'm tired, yet I'm still fucking doing it.3 -
Biggest regret is not what I have done, but what I haven't. A long long time ago, in the early 90s, I had a great idea for a game, but somehow I never made it come true. A few years later, Maxis launched a game very similar to my idea, and it was called The Sims.4
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Wk78
My worst dev experience was my first software as freelance...
1 month codding
When delivering the app the client didnt want it anymore...
Two years latter the client calls me because he had a problem... Merging hundreds of access 97 databases... Exactly what my software did (besides editing, filters and remove duplicates)
Told him I got mad, deleted the source code and was already working on a company...
He had to pay for a software company to do the same 10 times the cost4 -
My biggest dev regret was that I've followed other people's dream.
I lost precious time into trying being the "good kid" for my family and support them in their time of need.
Now I'm considered old for a starter and getting a dev job becomes harder with each passing day.4 -
Not being motivated enough to work on or finish personal projects.
Apparently, easier said, than done when you have a full-time Dev job.1 -
Spent 2 years of my career learning/working on a peice of technology/framework without proper guidance. Turns out whatever I learnt about it till now is useless
**cries internally**1 -
Using cookies for verification and validation without encrypting the values which should have been handled in the backend without any use of cookies.
I wonder how vulnerable by website was... -
Going trough 4 years of college and getting a degree in Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
As useful to me as Justin Bieber is useful to mankind.1 -
Choosing ReactNative for my project. Nothing works or compiles. Each fix breaks something. I'll go fishing...5
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That I'm Not working on my personal projects after university or work and beeing to lazy to even start learning a new language.
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Not only dev related but remember to constantly backup your important info of your Hard disk constantly... specially if those disk have not only the lastest code you are have been working on but photos of you and high school friends back in the day when the original Iphone was just released that you havent properly printed yet.
I think that is one of the nearest thing I can think of that I regret lately aside from simple being "my life" in itself
1 -
My biggest regret was leaving school for the workforce. I had aspirations of climbing the corporate ladder and maybe even being a leader or CEO someday myself.
It unfortunately took me too many years to realize it’s all a complete scam. You end up wasting away working on the most soul crushing of stuff, all to support someone else’s dream, and the people on top are not those who deserve to be there, but those who schemed and manipulated their way to the top. They often have zero idea what they’re doing and you end up having to do their job for them, while they take the credit and the big bonuses.
I had (and still have) many brilliant ideas for creations, but not one of my employers has cared about anything other than their bottom line. You are nothing but livestock to them, and they will treat you as such.
I wish now I’d just stayed in school and worked on my ideas and theories in an academic environment. If you think for a second companies will give a shit about you, think again.1 -
Forgetting to write that WHERE statement, on a production database, during a serious case of Schroedinger's backup system, that failed.
....
oops2 -
My biggest regret is underestimating what my school's server would log and what my teachers could see me do.
SSH is just way to powerful...4 -
Accidentally nuking my hard drive with diskpart's lovely clean command because I was trying to remove an Ubuntu partition.1
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Not adding input validation to that one page that time.
I knew my users were bad. I knew they'd fuck up. But I trusted the spec I trusted them.
Never again. -
Not moving to docker eariler and waiting for it to mature. Its mature now and i still have to write the same things as i would have 2 years ago
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I guess it would have been the school choice back then. Teachers were almost all really bad, going though a powerpoint at mad speed instead of making sure we got it, and the other students were elitists: you don't know how to code / use this framework? Why haven't you commit suicide yet?
This school was a big part of how I lost all confidence in myself, and how hard to build it back. And the major actor of my depression. Yay. -
Not using github and keeping my finished projects somewhere for past 10 years.
I've started when I was 13, I'm 23 now and only recently have I started saving my code on an external drive, a cloud and on some on github.4 -
Buying a Macbook for development. Now I'm using a Dell with Linux and it's infinitely more convenient, useful, easy, documented, supported, better looking and I can go on and on. OSX is shit.2
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I regret not finishing all the personal projects I started. Then I would have had at least something I could have put on my CV and gotten a job earlier than at 23.
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Choosing to do my pre-thesis in something I'm not 100% interested in. This resulted in my partner wanting to do the actual thesis on his own (angering, but understandable), which leaves me hanging with no topic or evaluator 4 weeks before the deadline.
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First time setting up a linux distro for myself I decided to do it on an external hard drive. Accidentally formatted the whole thing. Lost 200gb of anime.
I restored about 60% soon aftet meeting up with a friend of mine. But it was still devastating.7 -
Biggest regret...
Choosing to dev on one of the less used cms ever: SPIP.
It's French, and had to use it when I was an intern. It have some interesting features, and can do quit a lot of things. But trying to find a job related to it is almost freaking impossible.
I tried to persevere into using it, but never got me anywhere. 🤔 -
I don't have many regrets in life but one would be that I didn't learn something harder at uni. I should have picked something like CS or cryptography or something like that. Even flat out math or physics would have been super useful.
On the other hand, the finance stuff I now see as common sense doesn't seem so common after all so there's that, and it helped me too.
I learned economics with specialization in finance btw2 -
Not leaving my last job earlier.
History: Supervisor / Lead Developer was a complete moron who watched videos on facebook and youtube, engaged in heated discussions on facebook, wasted my time by showing the work of other companies and vines, smoked in the office and towards the end gave me shit for not meeting deadlines of the work that he was supposed to deliver. Project that I was working on had very lazy clients so I was free for even 2 days sometimes and that’s why I decided to help my supervisor on the project assigned to him but in reality I was handling two projects all alone.
Aftermath: My indie games started gaining traction on google play and I found a client and I made 5x my salary at my last job.1 -
My biggest regret is not spending more time on Math. While I don't think it has hurt me directly, it has certainly decreased the chance of me learning some DL methods.
That and not pursuing a PhD.2 -
Start coding so late. I'm 29 and I have so much shit to learn... Next life I'm going to buy a rpi with my first 5 bucks.3
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Using the new project as an excuse to try out the language I was an absolute newbie at. (Python, at the time).
A couple years later when I’m much more proficient and I go back and look at that code, I want to slap past me for putting that spaghetti mess into production. -
Not taking university seriously.
Cost me a lot of lost wage power even if the degree taught me very little new. -
Now then... where do I begin 😐
TLDR - fuck charity
A bit of backstory first, I was in my first year of college when I started this project for this charity.
It started in December of last year, my tutor approached me and asked if I’d like a project to work on, for my portfolio and what not, I agreed as I thought it would be a great opportunity. Saying yes to that question is my biggest regret so far. Oh boy the pain it has caused me.
The projected started a few days after I agreed. The stack and stuff was already agreed upon by my tutors higher ups. The stack was Wordpress and a theme called ‘X theme’ I understand the use for Wordpress, they are a non tech savvy client, it will be easy for them to manage.
The project was to basically modernise the current site the charity had, simple task you might think... ohhhh no. We agreed upon a deadline, January of 2017 (spoiler, we didn’t make that headline). However the charity wanted change, after change, after change, after change, after fucking change. Every time I’d show them the new revision it was never right, they’d always want another change.
Once we hit the deadline I asked my tutor if we could just drop it. His higher ups said we had to keep going (I could of abandoned my tutor and left him to do it but I’m not a prick). Anyway, we are now in November of 2017, a whole fucking year later and the site has only just been handed off. A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR OF THIS MOTHER FUCKING COCK SUCKING PRICK WHO WOULDN’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER.
Please may god be with me as we have to provide support for this site 😥😥
If anyone’s really curious as to which charity it is or the site. I’ll post it in the comments if you ask nicely enough6 -
I regret becoming a frontend dev ( mostly because I started learning jQuery first and not pure js ) .1
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Ranting in the office about co-workers whilst drunk. Ooph. I mean nothing bad happens but it just feels bad afterwards.
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Not starting to work on internships and big projects in my second year of college,I had the skills but I was afraid that my academics would suffer :(
Atleast I would have earnt some cash one year early2 -
Not finding a way to make money posting YouTube videos all day long. Like that woman who uploads DIY “how to make slime from Elmer’s Glue” and makes over $100,000 every month from ads and merchandise. Or that 5 year old who makes millions per month in ad views playing with toys on camera and his parents upload it to YouTube calling it a “toy review”.
I wanna be a YouTube star for just a year so I can retire.5 -
I regret not learning c++ earlier. I learned Java before and now I have to work with mainly c++ for its libs and it took some time to adjust also I've never used Java for anything useful so far.
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Name a shittier API to hook into than Magento's REST API.
Protip: You can't.
[bit of context]
Building 3rd party integrations via their REST API and keep unearthing "WTF?!" architectural design moments. For example: Pulling down products tells you if it has a configurable parent (product to store all master options, etc)... but fuck me if I want to know what the sku of that parent is, or any other means of accessing it!
How the fuck M2 is such a major eCommerce platform is beyond me. WooCommerce in comparison however: Beautiful API, Beautiful documentation, a couple of limitations, no big deal. I love WooCommerce.
M2 makes me question why the hell I became a dev sometimes.2 -
Using Tkinter as my GUI when doing my compter science project instead of appjar or easygui. When the GUI isn't marked2
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My class team picks me for a competition.
My team tells me to do everything and doesn't give me an outline of what they want for the code or design.
They have 7 members. + me, 8.
I have to design and code the whole app on android.
Furthermore it was my first time with library stuff.
I had to develop from 10pm to 6 am with short rests in between. Almost no sleep.
It's impossible sht. I continue with it.
When it was time for school, I just went to school as per usual.
When it was the interview someone just had to roast the judges.
Our idea was very sophisticated; was to help track down elderly or child with a gps tracker and the app.
Didnt got in the qualifiers because of the leader being an asshole to the interviewers. -
Not training properly in the first 7 years of my programming career, which is theselast 7 years 😓
As a result, I have to re-do a big part of my work because I don't trust my older self around computers.3 -
I don't know if this can be classified as a legit "regret" or not, but anyway (hence no wk78 tag).
I've always chosen to focus more on the theory behind computers and computing rather than on practical dev skills. Not saying that the more theoretical things aren't fun - concepts from theoretical CS and maths still regularly blow my mind, as do the more "esoteric" languages like Haskell, Idris, and Coq. However, after seeing you fine folks here at dR talk about practical development, it feels like there's a whole world of stuff that I've missed about computers and programming, especially web programming. I think I'll tackle that next when I have some free time, maybe spend some time learning PHP to see what all the hate's about... (really though, it must do something right if it has such a huge userbase, plus, I think devRant uses it too...?)
Anyway, just wanted to say that you folks are really cool and an awesome source of inspiration. Best community ever.3 -
My regret will maybe be in the near future, which is not going to high school... I can still decide though!3
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not getting into html/css/js when i was younger. i'd be way farther ahead in my knowledge of other programming languages if i had :,<
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Go for a helpdesk position: Programming is to boring, just writing all the time...
What the FUCK am I trying to learn now?!3 -
Not using git{,hub} (at the earliest)
One does not simply keep a track of changes being performed every now and then in an entire project.
Lost some ideas or sometimes the entire project :/ -
My biggest dev regret is being complacent in my programming ability from way too early on. I learned a bunch of stuff from intro programming classes (which I always brushed off as "unnecessary" and "boring") because I was too ignorant to accept that writing the same Python code over and over wasn't progress. I'm way behind where someone with 7 years of programming experience should be, because I spent 4 of those years writing the same garbage.
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That I take everything too serious and it keeps downing my creativity and concentration.
I simply shouldn't give a fuck and learn through failures, because that is much more effective but I got educated to blame myself for mistakes. Stupid education. Takes time to truly understand that though. -
Borrowing a JavaScript book from the school library and realizing that it was published years ago and is very outdated because it always refers to the compatibility with Internet Explorer. I'm not sure if I should continue because after all, it's the basics. Maybe it's worth returning already... or maybe not because I don't always have access to the internet, but a book is easily accesible with or without internet.3
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The side project that takes up more time than the last side project I started. Wait what was the main project again?1
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Simply the fact that i didn't started my dev carreer earlier because of lets say reasons which costs me 7 years of time which on one hand gave me a whole lot of experience across some fields but god damn it sucks being near thirty and still being a student while other friends are already leading teams and working on million euro projects -.-
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Not using my period of unemployment to really delve into freelancing. It's much harder to do on the side. But I lacked knowledge and experience back then.
Also not interviewing companies better. Always ask about everything. -
Not finding my passion for programming prior to college. All that time wasted playing WoW in high school.
I mean besides the basics of HTML to edit my MySpace page, I knew nothing for anything computer related. -
I am a good kid, and I love to code... but my fucking college makes me learn shit that I don't want to learn, that too in a computer science stream. Should I kill myself because I feel trapped and my precious life is being wasted learning shit.5
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Using Bloodshed Dev-C++ and not wanting to change that for Visual Studio.
Transistion for VS wasn't simple, as I learned from the beginning od Dev-C++ and amount of 'hacks' that worked in DevC++ and didn't in VS were frustrating me. After a while I understood that DevC++ was a bad first choice IDE and things it did shouldn't have place, but habits die hard I guess.
Still like the lightweigh it had, tho. Wish VS was so simple in use at the beginning. :)1 -
Starting job where I am no longer a developer doing developing.
Damm I hate the ops job, now they letting me do pm work without pay raise or anything.
So worse mistake I ever made....1 -
I think I'll regret choosing Computer Vision with machine learning for my final project ...
Well ! Just need to find a practical application responding to customer needs and start working !2 -
It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.3 -
Agreeing to do iOS dev. I feel like my previous project has stolen 2 valuable years of my career from me.
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This is going to follow my rant from last week's group rant.
My biggest dev regret is not having confidence in myself and my work. It took me fifteen years to build up enough confidence to do this professionally, and I feel like I lost way too much time. Who knows what I could have contributed in that time? We'll never know because I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.
Oh, I know I'm hard on myself as well. Being self-taught, I have to be. For years I had no one else to hold me accountable. My boss usually has to soften my own critiques on my self-eval. -
Not learning proper OOP in college.
Having to learn that to fix some projects was a real pain back then.1 -
Biggest regret: Staying at my current dev job through the bad times (which started a week into the job). I've been here 2 years now, the first was a complete waste of my time, I was rudely managed and dumped on the projects nobody wanted. They were a complete miss-match for my skill set and not what I was told the job was about. In my first annual review I said I was applying for other jobs, I got moved to R&D within a couple of weeks, it's been better work and management wise but there's a perpetual threat of being moved back. I have my second annual review tomorrow. The money isn't great. The experience has been a mixed bag. After the first year it was quite interesting. But I probably won't be staying long.2
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Not using any kind of cvs or ticketing system when I worked freelance during my college years.
Then again I didn't know they existed.1 -
Accepting to work at a place that requires "extra hours worked as required" with any form of overtime being unpaid.
Thankfully I enjoy the people I work with so it's not all doom and gloom.
(I'd need to, having worked an extra hour and a half today [Monday])1 -
That I learned Java.
Got lots of work but nothing to be proud of.
Always has to clean up after mediocre fdevelopers. -
Not embracing the dev community in university more. I wasn’t a particularly good student but I missed some opportunities to be involved in some cool projects. I know that there will be more opportunities later in life, but I regret taking those opportunities for granted.
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Not writing enough utility programs for those occasions where you have no option but directly modify database tables in production.
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Not taking an UI/UX class. I think this would help me be a better front-end developer. And also, not enrolling in a coding boot camp full time like I always wanted to. I learn better in a classroom.
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My biggest regret is excessive, ignorant use of the `Shadows` keyword in a big vb.net app. That's not how you do inheritance.
It's been almost 10 years, and I still cringe every time I think about it.2 -
Not learning how to study and focus on something at High Schools. I'm learning the hard way, i often don't have time to plan a thing as i wish, i just have to do a quick plan, hope for the best, and eventually learn something in the end.
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Staying in my previous position as long as I did. I was underpaid, underutilized, and stuck using an aging subset of technologies.
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My biggest regret is not becoming a programmer sooner in life. Ever since I saw the computer wore tennis shoes when I was 5 I wanted to be a computer programmer. But my brother discouraged me saying it was so difficult but no one did it. So I thought I guess if no one is doing it.... Then in both Junior High and High School they have computer classes but you had to be friends with the teacher to even know it existed in the first place. I was not on good terms with him.
Thanks to a very encouraging Teacher at Art School I finally I was able to pursue my lifelong interest in computers. -
Trying a new job for a new experience with a technology I didn't know. And then figured out that's totally what I don't want to do and I stuck here because I have bills to pay and can't afford one month without a job.
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Never quite finding that work life balance. I love development but it's not really until this year I've noticed myself burning out and not appreciating life, instead I spend countless hours in front of screen.
Recently I've taken up amateur photography and started travelling my country to take scenic pictures and honestly it's the best decision I've made -
Not having kept sturdier backups of my first projects to show them to trainees to give them more trust
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Not pushing myself for a better university, stuck here until diploma without good professors.
Taught students from my group, been checking their labs for three disciplines, tried holding an "open IT community evenings" for full 15 meetings, assembled and disassembled group of game developers.
Hobby project are all my hope. -
That I did not have the rant idea earlier when I see a rant that could have come out of my dev life.
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