@retoor > "Three lines of python."

Fumbled around and got a C# example working. Pretty easy. Not three lines, I'm not a madman. With enough refactoring, might be worth posting.

@retoor > "I will see what I can do."

I found the java client repo (JavaRant). Pretty sure I can translate that to C#.

@retoor > "@kiki has written a solution in node that doesn't require dependencies (good job!) to download the rants."

Node? That seems like a big dependency. I'm looking for something simple.

https://devrantapi/rants/...

Not "Install Node, first install Linux, then learn all the obscure linux commands, configure the memory for this ...update the drive mounts for that...don't forget to update network drivers, and follow these 64 easy steps to get Node running..."

Great question (s).

Is there an easy way to download all of my rants?

@cafecortado > "You can say it's already encrypted, they won't notice the difference"

Base64 encode/decode. A bit ashamed I've used it to (lie?) convince users that data was 'secure'.

I haven't updated mine in over 10 years.

Back then, LinkedIn was the only 'social network' allowed at work. Facebook, etc were all blocked at the firewall. Any+all attempts to access blocked social networks were logged and reported to supervisors and managers. Luckily devRant wasn't flagged as a 'social network'. Whew!

Even then, LinkedIn traffic/posts were monitored and if you, for example, updated a job skill, managers questioned if you were updating your skills to be more attractive to other employers.

The catch 22 was they (upper-mgmt) wanted more LinkedIn activity to make us more 'attractive' for LinkedIn's searches, but didn't want to look too attractive for head hunters to make job offers to devs/DBAs (which did occur).

All that changed when the owner+CEO started getting requests from other CEOs asking why he wasn't on the socials. When 99% of the employees were on their phones anyway at these sites, it was dumb to take system resources to restrict it.

Hilarious, well done.

Add some sound-deadening material to get rid of the room echo and you got a podcast studio worth listening to.

@Demolishun > "we are using it at work"

Ditto. My simple lizard brain can't wrap around it.

We have a couple of what I would call 'WPF experts'. Ex. 'Brian' wrote a WPF data grid from scratch because of the bugs we ran into with DevExpress. His grid is good enough to rival "the big boys". Its almost magical to see him use WPF as a golden hammer.

> WPF isn't terrible

Let's agree to disagree. :)

I get what MS was trying to do with WPF, but not everything has to be 6 layers of MVVM "mud".

They shouldn't have used their own flavor of XML. The whole architecture reeks of know-it-alls who think devs love complexity.

Yep. Played X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter on a 386 with the turbo button. Those were the days.

Advice? You asked. Show some integrity and be a man.

Quit and walk out being the hardest working SOB in building. Who cares what they think. When you land the next job, you're going to walk a little taller, and others will say "Damn...gotta stay out Tounai's way...he's on a mission!"

"Quiet quitting" is for sissies! Now drop and give me 50 push-ups!!!

@Definition7 > "Respect! Lucky that those folk has gone away"

Or stupidity. My mental health struggled, but I knew if I quit, they'd win.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

@Definition7 > "You stay there for 10 years?!"

Coming up on my 27th anniversary.

Lots of ups and downs, that time frame was the lowest. Upside is all those folks have quit or been fired.

Started my CYA journey when users would say (verbally) "Change the button caption to XYZ". I change the caption. A month later "Why is the button caption XYZ? It is supposed to be ABC?" then I get lectured by a VP how I need to do a better job in listening to our users.

> "Your boss is NOT always your friend, don't trust them 100%"

And document *everything*, preferably off-site.

Emails, DMs, anything that could come back as "I never said that!?"

Cleaning up old CYA folders (10+ years old) and I found an email where the mgr was upset that I was taking off the week of Christmas saying he never approved that time off (which he has the authority to cancel).

I pulled the email I'd backed up from October where *he* approved the request (at that time requests were via email).

Not taking it lying down, he replied (in a new email) it was company policy that I re-request time off requests within 7 days of the time off (basically saying I violated policy and my vacation would be canceled)

I reply, cc-ing HR, (screen-shot the original convo), and a copy of the time off policy asking HR to clarify the new '7 day' policy I was not aware of.

I never got a reply from anyone.

> Is it just me?

No. I tend to focus more on error handling+logging.

When you access an external resource (web api, database, etc), are you logging enough information to troubleshoot the issue *when* it fails? What do you want to tell your future self about this area of code, because 6 months from now and a phone call at 3:00AM, you won't remember any of this.

Ex. This morning our access to Oracle cloud was broken. The only error logged was the JSON serialization exception. No context, nothing to indicate that service was the problem. Took about an hour for the dev to figure out it was a 404 response. He didn't ensure a 200 response before trying to deserialize. Oops.

If he had logged what the actual response was, the URL resource, he could have figured out the problem in about 3 seconds (and keep about 6 other techs from scrambling around pointing fingers at each other)

@retoor > "I love coverage"

I do as well. I believe if the code can be tested, it should be tested.

If the code can't or doesn't need testing (why would anyone test a method that sets a=b?), then don't.

We've had our share of TDD zealots that created quagmires of complexity just to say "My code testable!"

Creating an IDatamanager with 100+ methods and mocking this&that, or worse unit testing POCOs/models,

ex. customer.firstname = "foo", Assert.IsTrue(customer.firstname == "foo"),

does not serve the customer.

One of the worst examples is our web team created their own testing framework. It enabled them to have before/after scenarios (TL;DR) and "easily" have hundreds of tests. All was good until a .Net upgrade broke "something" and none of the original developers were here that knew how to fix it. For a long time (they had to re-write all the tests), our site had zero testing before deployment. "If it builds, ship it!" was the process.

@PaperTrail > Part 2:

Mgr: "but..but...if we have 100% code coverage, making changes is easy!"

T: "Two words. Technical debt. Test code is debt. Nobody, I mean nobody wants to change someone else's 5 year old test code. 100% code coverage is a lot of debt few are willing to pay. I've worked with Cerner and 100% code coverage is non-negotiable. People's lives are at stake, so they are willing to pay the price. Here? You guys write CRUD apps. I'm sorry, trying to get 100% is a feel-good number."

<Mgr, pissed off, walks out>

I almost wanted to give him a hug. I've been saying that ever since the dev mgr came back from some big shot Gartner Group training. My guess is he ate lunch with someone who asked him about code coverage and the mgr couldn't answer him.

We've been fortunate that all our in-house trainers have been working developers that 'teach on the side'. They had the "this is the theory, but this is what works ..." mindset. YMMV

Boring history lesson part 1:

Ex. many years ago we had a trainer come in to teach the 'proper way' to unit test (the dept mgr was pushing for 100% code coverage, TL;DR, and he believed a 'professional' could come in and shame us into shape)

Day 1, the dept mgr was trying to nudge the trainer into preaching the glory of 100% code coverage.

T: "Yes, 100% is the ultimate goal of TDD, but I've rarely seen it in practice. You have to set the goal to what works best for your team. If your coverage is 20% and you're stakeholders are happy, then that's fine. If it's 100% and developers are afraid to make changes because of broken tests, then that's bad."

@tosensei > "having money is no indicator of having any kind of qualification. only of 'being lucky'"

100%. #iamafraud

@Lensflare > "programming in MS Word"

Programming? No, everybody knows MS Word is for web site development. :)

Our early intranet content (before Sharepoint) was written in MSWord. Users had shared folder for the docs and would "publish" (file->save as html) directly to a shared folder in the wwwroot.

My gosh those were simple days.

@JS96 > "Visual Studio has the best UX, UI and performance in my opinion"

There are some that feel writing code at a command line level makes them superior.

Are they? Probably.

If I have to go to a command line (powershell, etc) to do my job, I'm doing something wrong.

@tosensei > "you don't know that rider exist"

Let me check my success record ...bank account...401K...both kids college paid for 100% (no student loans) hmm..tools like Visual Studio has worked out pretty well for me and my family.

Could I use rider, notepad, pen&paper? Sure, but I'm not smart enough to do what I do and succeed using those tools. I'll have to leave them to the experts.

#iamafraud

@tosensei > "who TF is even using visual studio at all?"

Using it right now. Got about 20~ish devs here also using Visual Studio.

@Demolishun > "G502"

Nice.

My G602 switches wore out after many years of faithful service. I think I paid around $30 back then, I can't think about paying close to $100 for a mouse now. Been watching the sales and refurb market for a < $50 (wireless) G502. Dealing with my $10 backup TechNet "gaming mouse" in the mean time.

> "Bought Logitech gaming mouse."

Which one?

> "over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it testable."

Amen!

Our code base is littered with IDataAccess interfaces that are simply data access repositories.

I'm fixing an old dell laptop that the HD crashed and thought I'd play around with linux (on a new HD, of course), is Ubuntu a good choice? Others? Lots of distros out there with everyone saying "The one I use is the best!!!"

Examples? We can't make fun of the code without some examples.

I use Glary Utilities (https://www.glarysoft.com/) to clean up my computers. Nag screen every once in a while, but for free, it's OK.

> "this thread is more about empathy and awareness"

Don't stress Microsoft politics and its pushing something new ever year or so.

I've had this argument with some pretty smart folks over the years with .Net. I say, it's all the same, just a different suffix and has zero impact in my life. Other get giddy, scared, stressed, <pick your emotion> over .Net this, .Net that..when it changes nothing in our code base.

J: "OMG! This <random feature> is going to save the company 100,000 lines of code!!"

Me: "Are you going to re-write our entire code base just to use that new feature?"

J: "No, that would be stupid"

Me: "So, that feature will save the company ... zero lines of code?"

J: "Smart ass."