Details
Joined devRant on 10/20/2016
Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Teaching 7-8 year olds the basics of web design. We're we're playing with CSS and changing colours of block elements and text. One girl put up her hand, completely confused as to why it wasn't working. Her code:
Section {
Background-color: rainbow;
}
Oh the wonderful mind of children26 -
Heard a new one from the client today.
Said with a straight face, "You guys write your HTML in all caps, right? It's better for SEO."6 -
Picked up a legacy site to re-build, turns out just adding:
'?admin=1'
to the query string gave you full admin rights to the entire site without having to authenticate. The site was live for 2 years.3 -
!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!221 -
Knowing that yours is probably the last job that will be automated, followed only by complete annihilation of humanity by artificial intelligence..5
-
The best parts of being a developer:
1. Full Internet access and admin rights.
2. It's nearly impossible for someone to tell if you are working or just zoning out.
3. We have the best online communities... because we make all of them.7 -
!rant
Today i got a job offer for 20k more than i'm making right now and a better company and culture.
I can't wait to see my managers face when i tell him. He has being an asshole since i started.13 -
Bob Martin. His books Clean Code and the Clean Coder, and all his talks on architecture, SOLID and TDD. I could listen to him talk for days, and he taught me everything i know about writing clean code.2
-
This talk by Rich Hickey had a tremendous influence in how I approach my work:
https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc
His Hammock Driven Development is my absolute favorite when it comes to work principles in programming/engineering. It also the one that is the hardest to explain to most PMs and leads because it can look like you are slacking off while others are producing hundreds LOCs. That you'll write better, less error prone code that won't need as much QA iterations is something you first have to prove to them but to me, it's well worth the effort.
If you have 40 minutes of time, do yourself a favor and watch the video. Maybe it'll have as much influence on you as it had on me 😃 -
Bob Tabor.
He is one of my favourite tutors. Fell in love with C# after starting with his videos.13 -
When a great developer in your team decides to leave for a bigger company and then half of his last day is for him to share all the knowledge he can to the team.
I'm a little sad about our loss, but really glad for him and for all the things I just learned.4 -
Today I figured out how to remotely control my student's computers and how to send them messages when they're not doing the right thing11
-
Spend half an hour finding music to listen to while I code; Pause it after 30 seconds to concentrate on refactoring. Stays paused for rest of day.
Really getting the most out of those expensive new headphones.35