Well said mate... well said...☝

My employer bought some new 40" 4k displays to the office. The want us to evaluate if they are any good, and if so replace all monitors... No real developers has one, only HR people sitting there with one huge window with office or word open!! It makes me cry! And they will most likely say they are too big!

When everyone left the office I tried one... OMG, i need this in my life! 😍

Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

*Now that's what I call a Hacker*

MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS

This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.

xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.

xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"

xxx: You're gonna love this

xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.

xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".

xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.

xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.

xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those

Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT

The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...

Looking for a job as a deveoper be like:

Job title: car driver

Job requirements: professional skills in driving normal- and heavy-freight cars, buses and trucks, trolley buses, trams, subways, tractors, shovel diggers, contemporary light and heavy tanks currently in use by NATO countries.

Skills in rally and extreme driving are obligatory!
Formula-1 driving experience is a plus.

Knowledge and experience in repairing of piston and rotor/Wankel engines, automatic and manual transmissions, ignition systems, board computer, ABS, ABD, GPS and car-audio systems by world-known manufacturers - obligatory!

Experience with car-painting and tinsmith tasks is a plus.

The applicants must have certificates by BMW, General Motors and Bosch, but not older than two years.

Compensation: $15-$20/hour, depends on the interview result.

Education requirements: Bachelor's Degree of Engineering.

I put an Easter egg into a product, that if you enter the string "final countdown" into the stock code search field, it plays a YouTube vid of Europe's "The Final Countdown", in a hidden div. It's an in-joke for a few people in the company.

A well meaning maintainer with no sense of humour or judgement takes over and goes on the warpath against any hardcoded strings. The secret code gets moved into a config file.

A third developer changes the deployment script so that it clears any configs that aren't explicitly set in the deployment settings.

So the secret code is now "".

Literally every PC in the stock buying department is now blaring out "The Final Countdown" at top volume.

...Except none of them have speakers, so it remains this way for over a year and two more changes of maintainer.

I just noticed this afternoon and quietly re-hardcoded the string. The buying dept.'s PCs will silently sing no more.

!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!

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

My brother and I have been messing with our IBM 5150 and doing cool stuff with it. I got it to play a youtube video via telnet via my bro's mac via mplayer with libcaca (ascii video output) + youtube-dl (a youtube downloader. The mac is doing all the heavy lifting, but it is still cool to see these images on a IBM 5150, just by typing a few commands on that old keyboard... more fun projects to come with this old thing.