“I need one fullstack engineer”

“Ok, what exactly do you need?”

“Javascript, Nodejs, C/C++, CUDA, Andible, RabbitMQ. Oh, and I need him/her now until end of February”

Don’t we all just love these kind of discussions?

Why do so many people worry about their competences to perform the tasks they get?

You are hired to do the kind of work that gets assigned to you and not to worry if you are qualified to do it. Unless you are in a shitty* company this is someone else’s job to worry. I see people doing this to themselves and frequently have to let them show the value of their work. Many times before they understand what I see in their contributions.

Stress is fine, it will help you get further. But only to a certain point. If you don’t have faith in your capabilities, have faith in the management team...

* if you are in a shitty company, you should adjust your priorities. Do not worry too much, learn as much as you can and seek other options.

Not being able to persuade the client that storing plain text passwords so that they can send them to their users when they forget them is not the best way to handle user accounts.

This happened in 2012 but it still hunts me like it was yesterday.

Before you all demand to ban me from devRant, I’d like to say that we impelemented an alternative (unpaid!) for this, but were requested to disable it.

Some things should be prohibited! Such as trying to look smart luring geeks with PHP code. That does not do what you wanted to do in the first place. Idiots!

Remember not to cook while working on challenging problems! Please, once and for all!

Today I learned why it’s so important to have life outside engineering (better put, I remembered this).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working hard to catch some deadlines, contributing to a large oss project. Getting up at 4am, working with the team in my timezone, having some time with family then working with people with 6-9 hour difference was extremelly challenging and I was so tired I literaly was a fucking pain to bear with.

Today, on Saturday, my wife started cleaning the bathroom sink drain. You know, started... “won’t fix” was not an option. First, the dirt and the smell, mmmmmm, you just have to love it. And then the thing collapses (yes, I was optimistic, trying to clean it just partly - I learned not to fix if it aint’t broken, I wonder where).

It’s of course built of trivial parts, but the water just finds its way. Needless to say, I am afraid of it :). In the end, it got resolved. Just as any bug we squash - with some anger and plenty of dirty words.

During the whole thing, I thought to myself, that all that stress at work is quite bearable; it put everything back into a perspective. Great feeling!

Fuck you for imposing the upper limit on password length for my online banking! Why do you even care about my pass - don't you fucking hash it beforehand?!

I always love hearing something worked as a coincidence of some random and supposedly unrelated change in the system that nobody can neither explain nor reproduce?

Don't you?

Backbone.js

Not necessarily the worst technology asit worked quite nice for the project, but rather the worst reason I have ever heard for choosing a technology: "it was popular that day" :)

Sub Window_(some 20+ params)
...
Window_Fenster(...)

Sub Window_Fenster(even more params)
....

Altogether, these two procedures had ~20k LOCs.

Anyone else having problem trying the subscription?

Be careful when complimenting team members to other PMs as they will soon be delegated to other projects :).

Amazing feeling seeing your 9yo opening the browser, finding a programming tutorial and just start learning.

This brings fond memories to those days when we were craving for the books in 90s.

Ummm, why exactly do you need to see my calendar to show me the list of contacts?!

I'd say that one of the most emotional days for my entire team was when a potential client called us and told us that they just rescued a teenage girl and prevented her from making a suicide by using our service.

The service itself is extremely simple and does not even work in all cases (due to various limitations). But when it does, it saves time, money and above all lives. When you realise that the girl who has already wrote her goodbye letter and ran away is saved at the top of the cliff... Well, then you know that you are doing at least something right!

I am getting better and better. I no longer leave ":w" at random places in Google Docs... Now I'm just "cmd-s"-ing regularly.

After doing a regular CV update, I realised I started coding more than a quarter of a century ago... I then remembered the first command the succeedded on my first PC.

format C:

There was a book that expained how to format a floppy disk (format A:) but it didn't work. At that time I had no idea what floppy is but I knew that C: works, so I thought I'd give it a try...

Oh, was there laughter in the repair shop :)

If there's one thing I hate about devs is definitely when they get too emotional about the reviews they receive.

Doing a thorough review always takes significant amount of time and energy. It's about ensuring high quality of code, about functionality and best practices, ... It's also about learning: I learn from the changes being reviewed while at the same time I also try to teach the author as much as possible, giving down to earth opinions.

It's never (or at least should never be) about attacking the author. There really is no reason why someone would spend all this time getting overly personal.

I used to start my responses with (lousy) apologies for being "harsh", but stopped doing this now that my team understands all of this. It also helped asking them to do the same with my changes. The look in their eyes when they find something is simply invaluable :).

how not to truncate strings...

Now that's one hell of an "interesting" commit history...

https://github.com/guillermooo/Six/...