> worst coding procrastination story

worst and best at the same time:

If you wait long enough things might resolve themselves.

My team inherited an ancient site. Hosted on an old host that the org wanted to kill, using an old log service the org wanted to kill.

A ticket was written in 2021 to migrate that site's hosting and logging to the new services our org started using.

My team kept avoiding it since it was a cheap unimportant site.

in 2023 we were about to finally take action - then we hear "Turns out the new hosting platform and logging platform are way too expensive - I know all of you have migrated to these new services but you gotta revert and go back the old ones til we figure this out"

We didn't have to do squat.

Problem solved by procrastinating ✅

> Advice to new coders

Don't worry over picking language A or B.
Just pick A, use it for a month, then move on to B.
In a normal 3 year college degree you'll try multiple languages, some of which you'll never use again, and they'll each teach you something.

I had classes in Java, C, C++, C#, Prolog, Assembler, F#, JS.

Never used F# again and no one uses Prolog. But they were great for learning recursion and logic.

It's not like you take "a step down a bad path" if you pick a language you're never gonna use again.

You'll also learn new stuff on the job. We have one team that uses Go and one that uses Rust. None of the devs ever studied those languages. They were mostly former Java devs who leaned on the job.

This week, the only team members working is our Team Lead and Project Manager. While I respect what they do I can't help wondering what the heck they are being paid to work on while no one else is around.

Which favicon sizes do you use? Most sites I see still use 32x32 as the default.
Plus a list of higher red icons with and an apple-touch-icon at 192x192 or 180x180 being the most common.

Reason I'm asking is Google recommended anything divisible by 48. https://developers.google.com/searc... First example is 48x48, which is not even generated by most favicon-generators and I rarely see.
And from what I can tell Google Search shows 32x32 for most sites.

Weekly Q: How do you keep yourself motivated?
A: No matter what - I allocate a little bit of time every week to something I really care about right now.

When I was green it was mostly learning. Now it's mostly codebase cleanup, dev experience improvement or dabbling with some feature that's not prio.

Might not sound like a lot but doing it weekly does add up.

Using the Devrant iOS app Incan't scroll down to load more posts. Is that intentional?

At least I cannot do it while using filters. My "front page" uses some filters and I can only see 10 posts. When I scroll down hoping to load more posts I attempt to "drag den to load more" but the app doesn't load more posts. I just see a spinner that vanished.
Bug or feature?

What's your thoughts on "nano learning"? For example having devs watch a 5 minute education video once per week rather than watching a 20 minute education video once per month.

I used to think it was a great idea, cause as devs we kinda do nano learning all the time on the fly while we are coding and googling.

However after my organisation has started sending us 5 minute education snippets - I've reconsidered.
Since it takes a few minutes to context switch from your current task to an education about something completely different it feels like an annoying chore.

Which movie or TV show do you think has caused the most damage and confusion about how programming actually works?

For me it's Silicon Valley with their "Tabs VS Spaces" scene where the dev who advocates spaces actually hits the spacebar key 4 times manually.

(In reality no does that - everyone just hits the tab key and most Editors convert the tab into 2 or 4 spaces bars on your setting. In fact a vast majority of github repos use spaces - despite some of their devs now thinking "I use tabs")

The Project Management Triangle "fast-cheap-good (pick two, you can't have all three)" is something I've never agreed with.

How would you promise to build something good & cheap?
Doing it slowly will not really make it cheaper. The cost is usually development hours. If it takes 40 hours to make a good product - doing it 2 hours per day isn't going to make it cheaper.

I like being an employee in product development team (rather than a consultant in a project) - we're exempt from reporting hours per project and making sure to stay within budget.

But on the downside it's frustrating to se how the org happily spends development time without considering we cost money. Just found out that one department ordered a campaign site that took 4 days for 2 devs to build.
It's now ended and revenue was only a few hundred bucks.
When I asked "Didn't we lose money on this project? Considering our salaries and the ~60hour dev time"

- "Oh no, we don't count the dev team as a cost! You already work here and would get paid no matter what" 😑

Good thing I'm not in finance.

Do you think the keywords used by git (or other version control systems) are intuitive?

I'm talking to a very junior dev about git and I find myself having to explain around the fact that I don't feel the keywords are great. They are asking good questions like
* Why do you say "push the commit" but then say "make a pull request" - when I want to push why isn't it called a "push request"
* "Why are the metaphors sometimes related to trees (branches), sometimes roads (forks) but you still call it "master" instead of tree trunk or main road?
* Why do you call it "commit", what kind of commitment am I making?

How do I exclude most non-programming related posts from my feed?
I don't want to see Facebook-like topics about weather and housing in my Devrant client.

I know I can use the toggle switch to exclude tags - and I have excluded some (like Jokes/Memes) - but the non programming rants keep coming.

Any tips on more tags to ignore?

For a Web project I usually start with copying a minimal boilerplate node app, find some api I wanna use, copy paste a single example of some data I wanna display and render something on a html page as fast as possible. Seeing stuff on a page motivates me to keep going and helps me figure out the most essential direction forward.

My new task is to Implementing a CMP (you know - consent management thing, those modals that ask which kinds of cookies you want to approve/reject trackers) and found out the project is lead by a person at Legal who's first question was: "Regarding our embedded twitter widgets, can you just look at the code to tell me everything they track, where they store their data, and your contact person at twitter"

The worst part of hackathons are schedules which leaves no time for actual coding!
I was once at 2 day event. Day 1 contained an intro lecture, 'getting to know your team' exercise, idea generation phase, idea feedback from industry people, mandatory coffee breaks, and a little bit of coding at the end.
Day 2 consisted of 'adding thet final touches to your hack', a random lecture from the company hosting the event, info from the judges on how to pitch, a trial run of the pitch and then the final pitches...
I barely think we got to code for 3 hours.

Does your team also tend to get stuck in the MVP Trap?

You ship a barebones version of a feature. Zero polish. That’ll be done later if it’s successful.

When the stats roll in it seems the feature got a lukewarm reception. A few users liked it, but it wasn’t a hit.

Next sprint starts and everyone asks if we should spend more time on it

The PM argues ”Why would we spend time polishing something no one uses?”

The designer argues ”Well of course no one used it, it looks like shit, we gotta spend some time polishing it!”

It becomes a chicken or the egg scenario.

Your product ends up with a bunch of half assed features. not bad enough to remove, not good enough to spend more time on.

What's your favorite multi-select dropdown?
My designer says dropdowns suck and I'm trying to convince them otherwise.
(Codepens/jsFiddles are welcome)

My personal favorite is bootstrap on desktop or native on mobile but not sure that's gonna fly...
/sorry for not-a-rant

That's what happens when you prioritize looks over usability

Disable Windows 10 Auto Updates

1. Run gpedit.msc
2. Set "notify for download and notify for install" according to this screenshot http://i.imgur.com/VjpeDHWh.jpg
3. You will still get an annoying popup saying "get updates" but windows will never autoinstall them and autorestart your machine.