So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨

New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.

In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)

Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?

Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.

Hell yeah

"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"

"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"

"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"

"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".

"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"

"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"

Anyone looking for something interesting to do???

Step 1) understand how basic circuitry works on a bread board nothing too fancy. ( Implement NAND, AND, ADDER, SUBTRACTOR)

Step 2) learn about microprocessors and how OS works

Step 3) learn assembly

Step 4)write a basic assembler and understand how loaders and linkers works !

Step 5) write a kernel with very basic features like memory management and process management and some drivers for IO

Step 5) write an emulator for some simple systems .! ex chip-8.

Step 6) read about compiler theory and automata

Step 7) write a basic Python interpreter that compiles (not interpreter) to native assembly.

Step 8) implement TCP stack .

Step 9) learn as much as u can about complexity measurement ), data structures and algorithms using C or C++ it's very important ( familiarity with pointers and thus computer memory )

Step 10) learn any high level language of choice like Python or Ruby.

Step 11) stop debating over tabs vs spaces , emacs vs vim , angular vs vue, php vs Python , OOps vs procedular vs functional ( just know about all of them and when to use but don't fucking debate over which one is superior )..

Step 12) live happily and be healthy.

Husband wanted to not go out after dinner to "go cuddle in bed." This apparently is code for him browsing mathmatica stack exchange and reading books on data analysis with R... 😂

*Interview*

Interviewer: We have an opening. Are you interested to work?

Me: What is that I'll be doing?

I: What technologies and languages do you know?

Me: I know Scala, Java, Spark, Angular, Typescript, blah blah. What is your tech stack?

I: Any experience working on frontend?

Me: Yes. But what do you use for it?

I: Can you work with databases?

Me: I can, on SQL based. What are yours?

I: Can you do big data processing?

Me: I know Spark, if that's what you are asking for. What is it that you actually do?

I: Any experience in cloud development?

Me: Yes. AWS? Azure? GCP?

I: Do you know CI CD?

Me: Excuse me.. I've been asking a lot of questions but you're not paying attention to what I'm asking. Can you please answer the questions I asked.

I: Yes. Go ahead.

Me: What will be my position?

I: A full stack developer.

Me: What technologies do you use in your project?

I: We use all the latest tech.

Me: Like?

I: All latest tech.

Me: You mentioned big data processing?

I: Yes. Processing data from DB and generating reports.

Me: what do you use for that?

I: Java.

Me: Are you planning to rebuild it using Spark or something and deploy in the cloud?

I: No we're not rebuilding it. Just some additions to the existing.

Me: Then what's with cloud? Why did you ask for that?

I: Just to know if you're familiar.

Me: So I'll be working with Java. Okay. What do you use for UI?

I: Flash

Me: 🙄

I sat for a couple of minutes contemplating life.

I: Are you willing to join?

Me: No. Not at all. Thankyou for the offer.

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Recipe for a Great Programmer:

Ingredients:
-Books for a computer science curriculum from a top university
-Computer
-Headphones
-Internet
-Stress ball
-Pillow
-Lighter fluid
-Food

Directions:

1. Cover computer science books with lighter fluid
2. Light books on fire
3. Use flames to cook an energy-rich meal for the thousands of hours ahead
4. Pick an IDE
5. Choose a project beyond current capabilities. Good ways to push boundaries:
- Unfamiliar domain (e.g. large scale data processing, UI programming, high performance computing, games)
- Exotic programming language
- Larger in scope than any project before
6. Shut up about your IDE
7. Attempt to build
8. Stop procrastinating on Hacker News
9. Re-attempt to build
10. Squeeze stress ball and scream into pillow as necessary to keep sanity
When stuck:
- Paste stack traces into Google
- Find appropriate mailing list to get guidance
- Realize that real learning happens when you are stuck, uncomfortable, and/or frustrated
- Seek out books, classes, or other resources AFTER you have a good understanding of your deficiencies
11. Repeat #4 to #10 for at least 10 years
12. Results guaranteed! (to the same extent static types guarantee bug-free programs)

source: nathanmarz.com

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

How did I start:

It was 1994. I had been kicked out of school on academic behavior. I was working at as a telemarketer to pay the bills. I got drunk on St. Patrick's day and over slept my shift. My boss was going to fire me but said he wanted to give me a second chance. He asked if I knew anything about computers. I said no. He said if I was willing to learn, our IT guy was burning out and needed help. I said ok. Next thing I know I'm learning how to write SQL and importing data to print call cards. I read the manual for Foxpro and started building small desktop apps as labor saving devices. 6months later in knew more than our IT guy. Later a friend showed me "the Internet". I went back to our IT guy in amazement. He said it was just a fad. He called it the CB Radio of the 90s. Our network we ran was called Lantastic.

I immediately quit went back to school and changed my major. I have been a full stack Java Web developer will the heavy emphasis on UI since 1999.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

Data structures.... The easy way....

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

One:

Had a stack of harddrives with my important data, two USB drives and a 4.7gb disc, two or three cloud storage accounts.

Needed a restore:
Knocked the stack of hard drives onto the floor (all broken), stood on one of the flash drives, found the other one in a pocket of a pair of trousers which just came out of the washing machine, dvd too scratched to read and couldn't verify my cloud storage account because I lost the password to the connected email account and the backup email account to verify that one didn't exist anymore. Fucking hell.

Two:

Production database with not that much yet but at least some production data which wasn't backupped.
Friend: can I reboot the db machine?
Me: yup!
Friend: what's the luks crypt password?
Me: 😯😐😓😫😲😧😭

End of story 😅

For the record, the first one actually happened (I literally cried afterwards) and that taught me to update my recovery email addresses more often!

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

So day 2 of my python automations.

I have spent 6 hours and a lot of stack overflow “research” to saved myself 45 minutes a day with file downloads (web & ftp and outlook emails), excel spreadsheets and data manipulation macros, all stored in a nice tidy zip file at the end.

Now to find a way to send to a web server for digestion 😎

And all of this in a poor 90 lines 😧

God damn why didn’t I look into this earlier?

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

Managements definition of an MVP:

- Integrate our backend and database with a similar-ish, older internal system built on a different tech stack and different rules.
- Merge the functionality and delete the old one.
- Modify our system to accept 2 types of logged in users.
- Have 2 versions of our API that return different values.
- Update our mobile app to render different data based on which user is logged in.
- Onboard the old system users to this new system.

My definition of an MVP:

- Tell the store we are taking over, that they have to print their labels from our tool, and onboard the users to our app.

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

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Stackoverflow and its relative partners will be closed for two days due to maintenance, new design, and moving server infrastructure from United States to 1km below the Switzerland Alps for extra layers of security. This decision was made by the recent CloudFlare data leak.
Now our servers will be able to handle data leaks because even though the data was leaked, it will fill the empty places in the rocks resulting inaccessible from attackers.
Stackoverflow and its relative partners' maintenance estimated time is February 29 - 30. We will try to finish as fast as possible and bring you guys the best experience. If the maintenance delayes, we will tweet via @StackStatus or post details in our status blog.
Thank you for your support and have a happy day.
Best regards,
Stack Exchange team

I was pressued to shift the blame.

We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.

I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.

By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:

"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."

The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.

A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.

I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.

With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage.

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

This rant is inspired by another rant about automated HR emails like "we appreciate your interest [bla bla] you got rejected [bla bla]". (Please bare with me).
I live in an underdeveloped country, I graduated in September, did Machine Learning for my thesis and I will soon publish a paper about it, loved it wanted to work as ML/data science engineer. On all the job postings I found there was only one job related, I sent resume, they didn't answer, couple months later that company posted that they want a full stack web dev with knowledge of mobile dev and ML, basically an all in one person, for the salary of a junior dev.
- another company posted about python/web scraping developer, I had the experience and I got in touch, they sent me a test, took me 3 days, one of the questions took me 2 days, I found an unanswered SO question with the exact wording dating to 6 months ago, I solved it, sent answers, never heard back from them again.
- one company weren't really hiring, I got in touch asking if the have a position, they sent a test, I did it, they liked it, scheduled an interview, the interviewer was arrogant, not giving any attention to what I am saying, kept asking in depth questions that even an expert might struggle answering. In the end they said they're not really hiring but they interview and see what they can find. Basically looking for experts, I mentioned that im freshly graduated from the very beginning.
- over 1000 applications on different positions on LinkedIn across the whole world, same automated rejection email, but at least they didn't keep me waiting.
- I lost hope. Found a job posting near me, python/django dev, in the interview they asked about frontend (react/vueJS) and Flutter, said I don't have experience and not interested in that, they asked about databases, C and java and other stuff that I have experience in, they hired me with an insulting salary (really insulting) cuz they knew im hopeless, filling 2 positions, python dev and tech support for an app built in the 90s with C/java and sorcery... A week into the job while I'm still learning about the app I'm supposed to support, the guy called me into the office: "here's the thing" he said, "someone else is already working on python, i want you to learn either react or vueJS or flutter" I was in shock, I didn't know what to say, I said I'll think about it, next week I said I'll learn react, so I spent the week acting like im learning react while I scroll on FB and LinkedIn (I'm bad, I know).
- in the weekend a foreign company that I applied to few weeks ago got in touch, we had some interviews and I got hired as DevOps/MLOps. It's been a month and I'm loving it, the salary is decent and I love what I do.
Conclusion: don't lose hope.

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

kinda coding i guess, company specialising in making statistics for other companies, analytic stuff or such, wanted stack: php, mysql

Interviewer: so here is our tech guy, who will be your boss if... so he would like to ask a few questions
techGuy: how would you ask for all the rows in a table? * looks at me *
Interviewer: * looks at me too *
me (learning inner, outer, left, right joins and transactions yesterday): * am i a joke to you? *
also me: * they must be making fun of me or something * well the query should be SELECT * FROM tableName; but one should really not use that, as * in theory really slows things down, because it loads unnecessary meta data bla bla
they: * look at each other * You're really good young man! Yes of course we know that, haha!
Interviewer: You said you just finished Uni, you doesn't seem like a junior to me! good job!
techGuy: so how would you LIMIT your results to 100 rows?
me: sigh * looks at door without turning head, so they wont notice *

A girl takes less time in getting ready as compared to windows 10😂😂😂
#WeekendHumour
#myOriginaldontCopy😏

Tldr; its a long introduction

Hi Ranters,

I've been on this app for quite a while now. As a shy cat watching from a distance and reading all kinds of rants. Anywho I feel comfortable enough to crawl out of my shell and introduce myself. Since I feel you guys together made such a pleasant and safe community, I'm really happy to be a part of it!

Anyway I'm Sam, 24 year old, from the Netherlands. My favorite color is green. Mostly the green you can find in nature. The one that calms you down:). I'm a very introverted person but always very curious and eager to learn new things.

I started to program when I was 12. I did assembly and C++. Because I liked making cheats for online games. Later I learned about C#, Java and Python. Mostly used it for web stuff, scraping, services etc. But also chatbots (for Skype for example).

Currently I'm 2 years in as a data scientist, mostly working in Python.

But on the side as a hobby and with an ambition I have a basic understanding of full stack development.
Mostly Nodejs, express, mongo, and frontend, no frameworks.

(I will later ask you guys some more questions about that! I could really use some advice!)

Anyway enough about me! Tell a bit about yourselves! Happy to get to know you all a little better!

Elasticsearch queries are FUCKING ugly

Elasticsearch documentation is FUCKING bare-minimum.

Kibana only shows data when it FUCKING feels like it.

Elastic stack is FUCKING annoying me

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

Only if people understood the amount of effort that goes behind building a simple app.
Even if it's a simple notes app, I've to design the UI (at least 2 different activities - 1 for the list and the other for editing notes), write the code which makes it run i.e. without which the app is just a piece of empty design, think about what data
structures to use (that notes you are saving need to be stored somehow) and then club everything together and hope nothing breaks (spoiler alert: something will definitely break).

People need to understand that it's not just putting some fancy buttons and boxes around. Also, I'm not just making the app for one device. I've to make sure it works on different screen sizes, different versions of the OS (a user can't imagine how many functions need to be re written because something got deprecated in the process and I'd to switch to something different).

Also I'm not just sitting at my computer and converting coffee to code. I've to think about the flow, structure, design, navigation, backend etc. Of the app; most of my time isn't spent writing code but thinking/studying how to write the code. I also need to wait while the project is compiling/building every time I want to test it.
A function which you think is hard to implement night be really easy while something you claim is easy might be a nightmare. Oh and I didn't even mention how I need to stick to some design guidelines to make the app look consistent with the rest of the OS.
If you're wondering why a developer is spending most of his time on a browser, he isn't playing internet games or browsing reddit ( at least you better hope not), he's probably looking at the docs/stack overflow to get something to work/fix something!

Wow! That was long. Thanks!

I started working for a company something around 1-2 months ago, they said because I don't have any experience with their stack, my salary will be lower than other team members. I said there is no problem and started my work. My first task was refactoring codes that their experienced programmers have wrote. My second task was extracting data layer from views. (They use Laravel and MVC architecture and they get data directly in views, not controllers). So, by end of the month when I talked with my boss I said I should get more money because I was better than your experienced programmers. He refused my request so I said I will not work with your team anymore :)
Anyway, never accept a job if you know you deserve more money than what they say will give you.

P.S: Sorry for my bad English. English is not my native language

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

Still dealing with the web department and their finger pointing after several thousand errors logged.

SeniorWebDev: “Looks like there were 250 database timeout errors at 11:02AM. DBAs might want to take a look.”

I look at the actual exceptions being logged (bulk of the over 1,600 logged errors)..

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Then I looked the email timestamp…11:00AM. We received the email notification *before* the database timeout errors occurred.

I gather some facts…when the exceptions started, when they ended, and used the stack trace to find the code not checking for null (maybe 10 minutes of junior dev detective work). Send the data to the ‘powers that be’ and carried on with my daily tasks.
I attached what I found (not the actual code, it was changed to protect the innocent)
Couple of hours later another WebDev replied…

WebDev: “These errors look like a database connectivity issue between the web site and the saleitem data service. Appears the logging framework doesn’t allow us to log any information about the database connection.”

FRACK!!...that Fracking lying piece of frack! Our team is responsible for the logging framework. I was typing up my response (having to calm down) then about a minute later the head DBA replies …

DBA: “Do you have any evidence of this? Our logs show no connectivity issues. The logging framework does have the ability to log an extensive amount of data regarding the database transaction. Database name, server, login, command text, and parameter values. Everything we need to troubleshoot. This is the link to the documentation …. If you implement the one line of code to gather the data, it will go a long way in helping us debug performance and connectivity issue. Thank you.”

DBA sends me a skype message “You’re welcome :)”

Ahh..nice to see someone else fed up with their lying bull...stuff.

What's this erogant world?

Someone asked a question in Stack Exchange, he put his design of a school management database and asked for suggestions.
Well, there are many things to improve, relations and data types etc..

BUT, he got 10 very long answers about why every student has exactly a father and a mother, why not 2 mothers and 3 fathers and all some off topic talks that could be said in 1 line..
Like what the... ok we know you're gay but answer the question without being an attention greedy

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Iran:
Job offer ==>
We need full stack developer for Java, c#, python, angular, flutter, ..
Data mining experience
Project and team management experience for 7+ years

Salary is 500$ per month

love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.

I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.

But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.

But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.

So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.

I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).

But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.

Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.

Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.

Promising the boss a 95% model accuracy when the arXiv paper says it can only reach 86% is what I call self-checkmate

Well after years of programming, I've hit my first runtime error that provides no info , the code fails prior to being able to generate an error so this is fucking fine :-)

And of course, the one time I need stack overflow, it tells you to initialise the class with data... Yet the class doesn't contain a fucking constructor... Smiley face

Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!

So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".

Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.

Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.

But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!

"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!

"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".

WTF!

We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!

Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?

I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!

Me to university: You taught us C++, java, DS Algo and PHP only right?

University: Yes

Me: So our college project must be around these only?

University: Yes... But No, here are your only options for our college project

1. MEAN/MERN Stack Website
2. Machine Learning
3. Data Science
4. IOT
5. Android App

Me: WTF?

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

More like a sub company/department inside a company: Android.

I still use it as my main driver, but every time I try to get back into development with it(did it professionally for 2 years nearing on 3 and was a lead Android dev, mind you not necessarily by merit....) I end up hating everything about it.

The tooling is meh, the API is hideous and even with the addition of Kotlin, which I do find a nicer language over Java I still dislike it. The ammount of shit needed to make something as simple as store data, manage fragments, integrate with the NDK, make JSON API calls or even shake motions is just ludicrous and counter intuitive. I can see why people would hate Java based on Android, a language that I generally love and defend.
I firmly believe that people extend frameworks or tooling for 2 reasons only:

1 the stack is so awesome that you just want to create packages and libraries to extend the functionality of a powerful environment, like gems for Ruby, python packages, Node packages, php composer, nuget etc

2 the stack is so fucking hideous that people need to fix shit: the entire android square utility framework, butterknife, flutter, react native, codenameone, etc etc

The case with Android is the second. I have not met a professional Android developer that completely likes everything about Android, but will seldom find people that HATE other frameworks or environments.

Android it is for me. Still my daily driver and I love every Android phone I have ever owned. It just makes me feel lots of more compassion for fellow Android devs.

Writing coroutines for io_uring. Submissions aren't working (they go through but the operation never seems to complete). Just fixed a few segfaults because of error cases not destroying coroutine handles correctly. Been on this for two days, finding more and more things I need to do that unrelated to the task at hand. Don't have issue tracking set up yet because haven't had time. Mountain of things that need to get working just for a demo is only growing. Layered maps of data structures and code flow are in my head as I'm trying to mentally debug some of this. I'm focused, completely dead to the outside world.

Then I feel a small scratch on my cheek. Three hours of mental mapping and a deep stack of thought, vanishes into thin air in a single moment.

The trade-off is worth it though.

The amount of "full stack" developers I've seen that know nothing about networking, servers or security has broken me inside over the years. Like cmon man either learn that stuff or stick to doing frontend. Don't put user's data at risk just because you wanna earn a bit more money

I can agree to shit when presented with hardcore data, data that proves me otherwise. But when people go by opinions and then hold is a truth because of "many feel the same way" I cannot help but to giggle a bit.

Most issues I have found with programming stacks come from opinions rather than hard presented data, if a bunch of people dislike a tool, but it delivers, I get to differ two things: (1) it is bad but it performs as needed, but it is bad because of design problems etc, (2) some dude made a post concerning why he things is bad and sheep mentality follows.

If technologies were without merit, then we would have all discarded C++ a long time ago cuz Linus disliked it, a powerful programmer indeed, but a FOCUSED one, meaning, one that deals with 1 domain (kernel development)

Do I care about what Linus things about web development? No, lol, he is a better kernel developer than I am, but I highly, grossly doubt that he knows enough about web development to give me something to think about.

all languages have faults, regardless of what point of view we look at them, but completely disregarding a tech stack because of shit that you saw some fucktard wrote about, benefits and otherwise, just seems....well...sheepish, there might very well be a tech stack out there that covers everything, to me it is a mixture of things, and I use them as I please and feel like, but this is because after years of learning I have read about quirks and pitfalls and how to avoid them. I would suggest you all do the same, by you all I mean those of high opinions that can't be deflected.

This field is far too wide and concentrated to go head and think about absolutes when even the fundamental mathematical theory concerning computer science is not absolute whatsoever, it is akin to magic, shit works, but it might not, the incantation might be right, but circuits and electricity have a way of telling us to go fuck ourselves, so do architectures, specifically ones based on physics.

Sorry to keep whining about my stupid fucking job, but y'all, I think I'm nearing my limit.

There's some good...I am pretty much free to resolve issues any way I want to, as the only other person in the company who "codes" only knows one old ass language that doesn't apply to 90% of the rest of the tech stack at all, and some SQL - all of that to say, we may disagree, but ultimately, these matters are always deferred to me at the end of the day, insofar as the actual implementation goes (which is to say I am not micromanaged). At least as far as non-visuals are concerned, because those of course, are the most important things. Button colors and shit, woo hoo**. That's what we should focus on as we're bringing in potentially millions of dollars per month - the god damn button color and collapsible accordions based on data type over the shit ass DB performance bottleneck, the lack of redundancy or backups (aside from the one I made soon after I started -- literally saved everyone today because of that. My thanks? None, and more bullshit tasks) or the 300GB+ spaghetti code nightmare that is the literal circulatory system of the FUCKING COMPANY. Hundreds of people depend on it for their livelihoods, and those of their families, but fuck me in the face, right? I'm just a god damn nerd who has worked for the federal government, a handful of fortune 500's, a couple of fortune 100's, some startups, etc. But the fuck do I know about the lifecycle of companies?

I could continue ranting, but what's the point? I've got a nice little adage that I've started to live by, and y'all might appreciate it: "If everything is a priority/is important, nothing is". These folks just don't fucking get it. I'm torn because, on the one hand, they waste my time and kinda underpay me, in addition to forcing me to be onsite for 50 hours a week. They don't listen to me, couldn't give a flying shit about my experientially based opinions. I'm just a fucking chimp with a typewriter, there to take commands like a fucking waiter. But there's a lot of job security, assuming I don't fucking snap one day, and the job market for devs (I'm sure I don't need to tell you) is hostile atm. I'm also drinking far more than usual, and I really need to do something about that. It's only wednesday - I think...not 100% on that truth be told, and I logged my fourth trip to the liquor store this week already.

**Dear backenders - don't ever learn front end, or if you do, just lie about it to avoid being designated full stack. It's not worth it.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.

So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.

We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).

Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.

Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*

Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.

Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.

SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances

Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -

SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -

...

Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.

We need an open-source alternative to stack overflow. They have fucking monopolizing pieces of ratshit admins there and lame ass bots.

I HAD A FUCKING 450 REP :/ and now i have "reached my question limit"

I mean its okay of you want to keep stackoverflow clean , but straight out rejecting the new queries should be against your god damn principles, if those mofos have any!

If it is so easy to downvote and delete a question for the mods, why can't they create a trash site called dump.stackoverflow.com ? whenever a question is not following their stupid guidelines , downvote it to oblivion. After a certain limit, that question goes to dump space where it will be automatically removed after 30 days. Atleast give us 30 fucking days to gather attention of audience !

And how does a question defines someone's character that you downright ban the person from asking new questions? Is there a phd that we should be doing in our mother's womb to get qualified as legitimate question author?

"No questions are stupid" is what we usually hear in our school/college life. And that's a stretch, i agree. Some questions are definitely stupid. But "Your questions are so stupid we are removing you from the site" is the worst possible way to deal with a question asker.

Bloody assholes.

Now, can anyone tell me that if am passing a parcelable list of objects in an intent before starting a new activity, how can i retrieve it in the new activity without getting any kotlin warnings?
The compiler is saying that the data coming via intent is that of list<Type!> aka list of platform type, so how to deal with this warning?

My first task in my current company, a few years ago.

I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.

There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.

This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.

Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.

As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.

I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.

But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-)

Two months ago I started working at a new company, who's system is a huge monolith. The company is a bit over one year old, and the code base is huge. The desire to move to more of a microservices architecture is on the radar, but one of the biggest issues in moving towards it is how we should keep our models. The stack is basically Node.js and Mongoose, where there's about a few dozen mongoose models that the whole system uses, and the issue is that, if we moved to a microservices architecture, how could we keep the models in sync. One idea I had was to keep the models in a separate (node) package that would be shared across all microservices, but then there's the issue that if one model needs changes, all microservices that use that model will need to be updated. Another idea we had was to not share models, but instead let every microservice be in charge of everything to do with a certain type of data (eg. Users are only directly accessed by one microservice, companies by another, and no two microservices share responsibility over data), but that might bring problems when one microservice depends on a certain set of data from another microservice. How do you guys manage all that? Any ideas or tips? Thanks ^^

Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.

The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.

Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.

The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.

A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.

I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.

I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.

Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.

Started a job as a full stack developer. My first task was shocking! Do these small edits on this backend script that collects stuff from one database and edits the entries in another... piece of cake so far!

Here is the project on the TFS...
HOLD ON! IS THIS VISUAL BASIC?!!
I came here to do .Net framework development and .Net Standard... I wasn’t told that there will be VB, I have never used vb.net before.

Now... that I’m going to maintain this script in the future, I decided to rewrite it in C#, few things I learned on my journey of doing this:
1- There is an access modifier in VB called Friend
2- There is a data structure/type called Collection, it’s a value,key pair! Not key value pair... Value first, then key!!
3- Do you know how null is null everywhere?!! In VB they call it Nothing! Yes, as in...
if(myVar == nothing)
{
//stuff
}
Asking the guy responsible for that choice... he thinks VB is easier to read than C#
I DONT WANT YOU TO READ IT, I WANT IT TO MAKE SENSE AND WORK WITH THE REST OF THE C# CODE WE HAVE!!

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

!rant ?

So I had 2 Stack Overflow questions open about Rails / Webpack data communication, plus one issue open on Webpacker's github for 3 days, desperatly looking for an answer or an idea. No answers.

Today I talked a bit with my flatmate about my problem, dude gives me a perfect, easy to implant solution, and life seems to be bright again. Thank you Alex 😥.

The company I work for uses Coldfusion which is a dead technology in my opinion. I was tasked with using a data grid for our data from our mssql databases. This data grid I was trying out uses ajax to make a call to the server and expects the data transfered back in Json format. well coldfusion sucks balls because it's serializeJson function returns a outdated JSON structure and I can't use it. So obviously this datagrid throws errors and when I try looking up coldfusion solutions online or scope out stack overflow, the posts are dated like 6 years back because no one fucking uses CF anymore. My boss loves to jerk to it, it seems because he refuses to change languages cause its all they have ever used. -_- this is 2016 bitch lol

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?

A little background:

I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.

I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.

There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.

I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.

Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.

I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.

Thanks a bunch!

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

I like how software is smart so I have to do things twice instead of once.

Automatically putting quotes works only if you put quotes and then paste inside it, the problem is I usually paste then put first quote and then need to remove second quote and put it on back and remove second quote from back.

Video start from where you left automatically fires and shows closing credits because you obviously want to see them.

Evaluate variable removes old evaluation because why you want old one when you have new.

Collapsing imports or functions in ide so you need to expand them all the time because who needs to look at functions when we have ai

AI models suggesting and adding meaningless annotations and code suggestions to distract me.

Randomly running some console command because I entered keyboard shortcut I don’t know even exists.

Literally every web browser address bar becomes advertising network instead of showing me history results.

Shadowing browsing history when you click back and forward button.

Search results are now buy results.

Suggesting me useless crap to watch because I watched one video in that topic.

Showing me 10 minutes videos as a solution to my problem where I want to find exact line of text to copy paste it. If I’m lucky I need to write text from video into my computer.

Stack overflow infinite loop of answered in #some-different-question

I think it’s about time for me to slowly retire from programming and software as a whole or switch to notepad because I don’t want to use this crap anymore.

Looks like software is now meant for entertainment and distraction instead of doing actual work where you need precise data and information.

Luckily if everything goes good I can retire soon and throw everything away for a while.

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

This Christmas I transitioned into a new job. At the old job I was the only kubernetes-guy, so since they no longer have any developers who are confident working with that, they decided to go with LAMP-stack.

The data from dev-kubernetes-server was backed up by some guy and moved to an offsite-server, or so they told me. Turns out, he had backed up the kubectl-config-file, and not the databases. Now everything is wiped. Sure glad we still have that config-file!

Of course, since that was only our dev-server, there was nothing too important there, except for all the documentation. The only other backup? On my laptop, which I turned in to them, and is now wiped and used by one of the sales-guys.

Now I’m being called in at least twice a day, since I was their goto-guy for almost anything backend-related. Feels great, after they spent a couple of months attempting to rewrite everything in pure PHP (with a strict no-dependency policy for some reason). Fml.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

After growing problems at work with basically being nothing more than an office junior who gets used to manually input data, with the occasional bits of development.

I sent my CV to a company one of my friends works for applying for a role as a full stack graduate developer.

I have a telephone interview tomorrow, little bit nervous

Long story ahead

Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.

Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.

I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).

So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”

This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.

Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.

Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?

Wow fuck today. I took the day off to watch the eclipse yesterday so coming in today was like Monday squared. Right off the bat I have somebody from last week that I had spend around 8 hours working to get their system right call in and tell me they were cancelling even though everything just got working right.
Also got tasked with documenting the servers which wouldn’t be rant worthy if the dev that set them up didn’t get cranky whenever I ask for credentials or even a rough overview of how the server stack is configured. Then I get a ticket about how a customer is going to get his data from his ‘web guy’ but this customer has been keeping his data in our system for the better part of a decade. Wtf you getting bro? And who is this web guy? What data does he have? Nobody seems to know. And just to smear shit on top it turns out I swapped the addresses on the car parts I sold on eBay and now I have to do 2 returns and cross ship and almost definitely get negative feed back. Fuck everything.

All this before lunch. After lunch I still have the same problems but at least I got chicken!

~learn react enough to make a full-stack web app
~learn Flutter
~get good enough at data structures and algorithms to pass a fucking coding skills test

2018: Data Scientist = Stack overflow copy pasting: "I followed a 12-hour 'DS' course on Lynda!"

lm() # science

Interviewer: What is ELK stack?
Me: It's a data structure which follows first in last out.
Interviewer: .......

Can anyone tell me what all things a developer should follow in order to be upto date. It's just too long of a thing.
I have been a back end developer, became a big data developer, then moving to becoming a full stack developer. Now I don't know who I am anymore.

So a front-end that:
- Contains duplicate data in the same page
- Does not adjust itself well with content that's not lorem ipsum
- Only looks aligned properly on one screen size
- Contains sections that I have no idea what to feed from my backend

k I can be a full-stack dev too. ty front-end guy.

The networking group at my day job, hooooooolly crap I have some unprintable words. But keeping it professional:

* Days to turn around simple firewall whitelisting requests
* Expecting other teams to know the network layout despite not sharing that information anywhere and going out of their way to not share it
* Adding bureaucracy in the form of separate Word doc forms despite having a ticketing system - for no justifiable reason
* Breaking production systems multiple times per month
* Calling in with problems that are clearly network related, being told it’s our systems, and then the problems magically go away even though they swear they didn’t touch anything
* Outright verifiable lies or vague non-answers when they’re not talking to someone at the director level or a vendor from an outside company on conference calls
* Worse packet loss and throughput on our LAN than my home ISP

Doing anything with these clowns is my single biggest source of stress right now. I can’t wait until we get a full SDN stack set up and then we won’t have to deal with them for day-to-day needs any longer.

My boss swears it’s better that we’re not managing the network directly, but I’m pretty sure my friend’s dog could be loosed into the data center to chew on fiber, and eventually the pairs would be connected in such a way as to improve performance.

Calling in all Vue devs here! (Possibly any SPA dev actually)

We're building these fancy live-edit fields for our app. It syncs with the database with every keypress (with a debounce, ofc). Now, we're having a global Vuex module to keep track of the applications sync state. Using this module, we can prevent the user from leaving the page if there is data that hasn't been synced. Though, I think I'm doing something wrong here, and not strictly adhering to the "single source of truth"-principle.

When a user has finished typing, a request is made through Axios. When the response arrives, the field issuing the request updates it's display accoring to the response. However, there is also an Axios interceptor which updates the global state to reflect the latest response. Is this wrong? Should the fields themselves emit the mutation to the store? Or is it okay to use an interceptor since they're running down the same call stack?

I think my biggest worry here is that the interceptor and the field will interpret the response differently...

Help is appreciated :D (and thanks for taking the time)

I'd like to locally encrypt files before syncing it with the cloud; what's the "best" software available for this?

I'm currently switching to STACK as my cloud service (it's a file hosting service for Dutch people that offers 1TB of free storage).
But I don't feel fully comfortable with them having access to all my personal data.

So I came to the conclusion that it would be best to locally encrypt files before syncing it with STACK. I DuckDuckGo'd but there seems to be a lot of software available for this so I'm not sure which one to use.

Which one could you recommend me? I'd prefer a free software but I'm okay with paying as long as it isn't too expensive.

I need to performance monitor our web app. I have been working on some speed improvments since some of our customers have complained. My boss wants me to be able to produce stats which he can use (and abuse) to highlight to customers that we have got quicker. I am currently looking at blackfire for PHP profiling to help with speeding things up but I need a top site overview for everything. Our stack is PHP (no framework), JS (jquery + vanilla), MySQL on Windows mainly. On premise solutions would be good since we don't traditionally run in the Cloud. Our system isn't SaaS and is installed on dedicated data centre servers or on premise

I've been given a huge stack of paper, some users stories and loose specs. Was tasked with engineering the specific requirements, then the models and finally the database. Then I need to build an API on top of that.
Stuff I'll use is Go and Postgresql. Small issue is, I've never done DBs, so I've no idea what to do or where to start.

Does anyone have any resources to help kick-start myself in this field? I've been reading on SQL, but that doesn't really tell me anything about data structures and how to transform those user stories into product requirements.

When my teacher starts talking about linked lists, stacks, and queues

Job hunting is hard!

I have over 10 years experience in software engineering. I do mostly full stack, so I can say I'm a jack of all trades and a language agnostic. I'd say I'm a good software engineer and will be able to tackle any task I've been assigned to. Having said that, my confidence in finding a new role is at an all time low.

I've been job hunting for 3-4 months now and so far I've only had 1 interview and it was unsuccessful. Now have been invited to a first round interview for another company (first of many rounds). It's going to involve many technical challenges like coding, algorithms and data structure and system designs.

In general I've had hardly any interviews (about 6-7 in total in my whole career). Due to my lack of interview experience, I've been getting anxiety especially now that the job market is tougher than it has ever been.

Firstly, how do you guys prepare, if at all? I feel like many of these interviews require you to be good at interviews, almost like an exam. If these questions were presented to me when I first came out of college, I would've had a better chance.

Secondly, how do you take rejections? I didn't know how painful it was to get rejected, regardless of how much I wanted the role.

I've been fortunate enough to still have my current job, but because of that I don't really have much time, nor the mental energy to study for interviews.

Apologies I'm advanced for poor grammar, I'm writing this on the train.

I was studying a lot the last year, i learned a lot about Machine Learning/Deep Learning, Data Gathering, Data Analysis, ETL, Model Architecture Design, Training, Fine Tuning, Backend Development, DataBases, API Development, ORMs, Rest, GraphQL, OAuth, CI/CD, Docker, Deployment to Production environments like Heroku, Git and more stuff i dont remember while writing this. I built and keep adding stuff to my Github Portafolio.

Im not able to get a job. I started looking for jobs as Data Scientists, no response never. I take a look at freelancer sites, nothing seems to fit my skills. And when there is a minimal fit, they always want a Full Stack Web Developer, i dont know Frontend Development, i dont like do it.

Dont know what to do or how to land any job.

My options aeems to be:

1.Learn Frontend Dev and work as Full Stack in underpaying freelance jobs

2.Keep applying to Remote-Only startups, but they still wants people with 3+ years of experience.

i cant work in my city, here are not any company startup hiring no one, we are 30 years in the past here.

What you do in my place?

How do you guys arrange apps on iOS /android

I use two arrangement

1. Smart Stack on the left and 4 related apps on right with stack showing the relevant data from one of the 4 apps

Do you have ever tried to recover a very valuable shredded stack of paper (4 sheets)? They are shredded into A LOT OF PIECES and not stripes as I hoped for!!

After 5 hours work I have found 15 pieces which fit together! I am so pissed about myself and my incompetence when it comes to data cleaning 😡😠🤬

After brute forced access to her hardware I spotted huge memory leak spreading on my key logger I just installed. She couldn’t resist right after my data reached her database so I inserted it once more to duplicate her primary key, she instantly locked my transaction and screamed so loud that all neighborhood was broadcasted with a message that exception is being raised. Right after she grabbed back of my stick just to push my exploit harder to it’s limits and make sure all stack trace is being logged into her security kernel log.
Fortunately my spyware was obfuscated and my metadata was hidden so despite she wanted to copy my code into her newly established kernel and clone it into new deadly weapon all my data went into temporary file I could flush right after my stick was unloaded.
Right after deeply scanning her localhost I removed my stick from her desktop and left the building, she was left alone again, loudly complaining about her security hole being exploited.
My work was done and I was preparing to break into another corporate security system.
- penetration tester diaries

TLDR: I'm switching between many webstacks and its starting to hinder my progress. What is the best stack to use with bootstrap?

Ok, guys I really need your help with this.
Currently, I'm working on a bootstrap page and it requires more dynamic pieces to work. It has become frustrating to continue moving on from where I'm standing and thus I would like to switch it up a little. I'm not used to dealing with several languages at once. Right now, I'm pulling data from the server with PHP, and I'm trying to quickly pick up AJAX to update data asynchronously in the page. However, the problem I'm running into now is how do I connect everything within my page in a coherent way that doesn't become a disjointed mess?

My question is in order to start building a dynamic bootstrap website --that communicates with a server to get data-- what can I do to keep myself sane and make everything a little more organized?

YGGG IM SO CLOSE I CAN ALMOST TASTE IT.

Register allocation pretty much done: you can still juggle registers manually if you want, but you don't have to -- declaring a variable and using it as operand instead of a register is implicitly telling the compiler to handle it for you.

Whats more, spilling to stack is done automatically, keeping track of whether a value is or isnt required so its only done when absolutely necessary. And variables are handled differently depending on wheter they are input, output, or both, so we can eliminate making redundant copies in some cases.

Its a thing of beauty, defenestrating the difficult aspects of assembly, while still writting pure assembly... well, for the most part. There's some C-like sugar that's just too convenient for me not to include.

(x,y)=*F arg0,argN. This piece of shit is the distillation of my very profound meditations on fuckerous thoughtlessness, so let me break it down:

- (x,y)=; fuck you in the ass I can return as many values as I want. You dont need the parens if theres only a single return.
- *F args; some may have thought I was dereferencing a pointer but Im calling F and passing it arguments; the asterisk indicates I want to jump to a symbol rather than read its address or the value stored at it.

To the virtual machine, this is three instructions:

- bind x,y; overwrite these values with Fs output.
- pass arg0,argN; setup the damn parameters.
- call F; you know this one, so perform the deed.

Everything else is generated; these are macro-instructions with some logic attached to them, and theres a step in the compilation dedicated to walking the stupid program for the seventh fucking time that handles the expansion and optimization.

So whats left? Ah shit, classes. Disinfect and open wide mother fucker we're doing OOP without a condom.

Now, obviously, we have to sanitize a lot of what OOP stands for. In general, you can consider every textbook shit, so much so that wiping your ass with their pages would defeat the point of wiping your ass.

Lets say, for simplicity, that every program is a data transform (see: computation) broken down into a multitude of classes that represent the layout and quantity of memory required at different steps, plus the operations performed on said memory.

That is most if not all of the paradigm's merit right there. Everything else that I thought to have found use for was in the end nothing but deranged ways of deriving one thing from another. Telling you I want the size of this worth of space is such an act, and is indeed useful; telling you I want to utilize this as base for that when this itself cannot be directly used is theoretically a poorly worded and overly verbose bitch slap.

Plainly, fucktoys and abstract classes are a mistake, autocorrect these fucking misspelled testicle sax.

None of the remaining deeper lore, or rather sleazy fanfiction, that forms the larger cannon of object oriented as taught by my colleagues makes sufficient sense at this level for me to even consider dumping a steaming fat shit down it's execrable throat, and so I will spare you bearing witness to the inevitable forced coprophagia.

This is what we're left with: structures and procedures. Easy as gobblin pie.

Any F taking pointer-to-struc as it's first argument that is declared within the same namespace can be fetched by an instance of the structure in question. The sugar: x ->* F arg0,argN

Where ->* stands for failed abortion. No, the arrow by itself means fetch me a symbol; the asterisk wants to jump there. So fetch and do. We make it work for all symbols just to be dicks about it.

Anyway, invoking anything like this passes the caller to the callee. If you use the name of the struc rather than a pointer, you get it as a string. Because fuck you, I like Perl.

What else is there to discuss? My mind seems blank, but it is truly blank.

Allocating multitudes of structures, with same or different types, should be done in one go whenever possible. I know I want to do this, and I know whichever way we settle for has to be intuitive, else this entire project has failed.

So my version of new always takes an argument, dont you just love slurping diarrhea. If zero it means call malloc for this one, else it's an address where this instance is to be stored.

What's the big idea? Only the topmost instance in any given hierarchy will trigger an allocation. My compiler could easily perform this analysis because I am unemployed.

So where do you want it on the stack on the heap yyou want to reutilize any piece of ass, where buttocks stands for some adequately sized space in memory -- entirely within the realm of possibility. Furthermore, evicting shit you don't need and replacing it with something else.

Let me tell you, I will give your every object an allocator if you give the chance. I will -- nevermind. This is not for your orifices, porridges, oranges, morpheousness.

Walruses.

just wasted 3 hours trying to navigate between two detail pages and removing the page from which i navigate from the navigation stack so i do not fuck up the NavigateBack.
did not work like i wanted it to work.
then i realized i could just repopulate the data without navigating at all...
10 minutes and it was done -.-

Sometimes i am such a moron

Need some advice here.

So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.

I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.

I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.

Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.

In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.

I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.

If knowledge was stored on a data structure such as the stack I suppose you'll never have a full stack.

It took me a month to self taught web dev with jQuery
- made 3 sites for school projects

Took me more than a month to learn the MEAN stack.
- taught it to students as a TA in software engineering class for 3rd year while I was at 4th year.

Took me 3 months approx to learn RoR and Clojurescript at my current work.
- year later I am one of the main devs, and pushed the company towards big Data while implementing scrum and pushing for devtasks priority.

Learned React but I am still struggling to figure out how to start a new project.

And I am still fighting Eleverytime I need to center in CSS.

Am I a bad dev mommy?

Conspiracy theory:

AI is peddled around companies because it's a great front for them to take all of your data and "train their models", ultimately its all about legally owning what you create and use it for self-promotion with minimal extra cost.

There isn't actually any "AI models" in the back of the company tech stack. It's just a word on a legal document as an excuse to take your data.

Disclaimer: I should know what I'm doing but I don't. 😢

I'm a very experienced full stack dev (15+ years), but I don't know the more modern JS frameworks. I'm trying to learn React and I have a little project I'd like to do.

I have database (in both SQLite form and JSON form). I'd like to read from it, parse it and run various displays in a shared hosting environment (that doesn't have node). So webpack. And either an API to get the data or a React compatible SQL component.

But dagnamit, I cannot find a tutorial or example with this kind of set up and I can't figure it out. What packages do I need and what kind of config?

I genuinely thought this would be a traditional and simple architecture but I'm obviously mistaken. And I'm about to turn in my developer card because I'm clearly a stupid twonk.

Has anyone done this? Do you know of any tutorials or examples of this kind of thing? Is there somewhere else I should ask this question? Thanks anyway...

Recruiter: We are looking for a full-stack expert. You have taken multiple apps from conception to deployment, and have experience and opinions on the best technologies to use and why. You should be comfortable implementing new features from scratch, making changes to existing features and writing complex migrations on production data.

Dev: lol

What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?

At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS)  + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)

Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

I figured I would share my Capstone from this semester with a community that might be interested. An eclipse plugin that was developed in our lab is able to implicitly track developer eye gazes as they work in an IDE (eclipse in this case). Before I began work on it, source code, bug reports, and stack overflow documents could be tracked with all of the data on said documents being extracted. For example, if source code is being tracked, everything from the file name and class/method name down to statement types are collected. The tracking isn't on still images. Since it's within an IDE, you can open multiple files, scroll, and modify -- all while tracking is collecting accurate data based on the (x, y) gaze coordinate and the handler assigned to the type of document/file being viewed.

My job was to extend this functionality to track gazes on UML class diagram documents. This means I had to gather data at the highest level: the class/connection being looked at, down to the lowest level: members/methods, their types and containing classes.

Being new to Java's EMF, GEF, and eclipse plugin development, I had a bit of a learning curve. Anyways here is the poster of the functionality I added. 🙃

Not much of a rant haha.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

I have started a freelance full-stack project with some existing code-base and it was horrible. They only have API endpoints for fetching whole data. No limit, No sort, No filter. They are doing all this shit on the front end. They are even aggregating data on the front end. Seriously who the fuck does that? On top of that the guy who has coded it was a senior developer. I am wondering now, did he write that kind of code purposefully or this kind of shitty devs actually exists?

HELP!!

I am starting a new contract to create a full stack web application with a medical company that will contain some sensitive data about their clients/patients.

I have been working as a salaried full-time employee for a medical software company, but I have been shielded from any sort of lawsuits from the client (worst case scenario, I'd get fired).

Do any of you have any advice on what I should do to protect myself in terms of LLC's, Insurances, etc?

The rear ducking continues. We've built a reliable translator in the dumbest fucking way possible, it's just lovely. I simply reused the structure for feeding data to the VM assembler, an array of arrays, where there's one array of (ins [args]) per node in the parse tree.

It's nice because nodes can be solved out of order without affecting the actual sequence in which the instructions are output. And if one statement (node) equals multiple instructions, you just push multiple entries to the corresponding array, or push nothing if you need to output nothing. Easy as goblin pie.

This is enough to convert an input language to the assembly-like intermediate representation we use for the virtual machine. So then there's doing it backwards: walk the same array of arrays, and map those virtual instructions to a physical architechture. I guess I could do the encoding to native binary myself, it'd certainly be interesting to try, but I'm burnt-out already so I'll just use fasm for now.

Initial test: wrote a test program in my own stupid language, ran the translator, dump output to file, assemble that with fasm, run with r2 -d.

Crashes? No.
Runs fine? Yes and no.

For fuck's sake, I don't have syscalls. Mainly because the VM doesn't have an operating system, lmao. I was testing virtual programs by just freezing state, terminating, then dumping the fucking registers and stack to the console, we have no I/O to speak of. Not even a real 'exit', VM handles that by reading a return value every step like a mentally damaged son of a bitch.

So anyway, I manually paste the linux mambo, you know:

mov rax,60
mov rdi,0
syscall

And NOW our program can end execution without crashing.
Okay then, so does the test code work correctly?

** DRUM ROLL **

Yes.

Ladies and gentlemen, mother fucking PESO is now a compiled language, and going forward I will be expectantly receiving your marriage proposals for reviewing. Oh, but not so fast, we still need a frontend...

Well, we'll handle that in the next few days. I'm just glad to be *nearly* finished with this fucking compiler, I want nothing to do with anything else ever, but we know that's not going to happen, so Lord please end my pain.

No sponsor as this rant has been paid for by tax evasion.

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

Cross-platform open-source & free password manager.

Description:

Cross-platform mobile/desktop password manager application. No backend needed, private data will be encrypted and stored in Google Drive/One Drive/Dropbox etc...

I've used multiple applications over the years but they pricey (especially if you switch platforms) and most of them don't have full cross-platform support.

Also, I've made a POC app with Ionic a while ago, but I didn't like the hybrid app feel.

Tech stack:
Js/React Native

I don't know if I'm projecting but I think my manager never agree with any idea I present to him. I had to bring an urgent implementation to VP for him to accept it. I feel like we, as a the team, stuck with whatever tech stack he chose, whatever he feels comfortable. No improvement, no challenge, no stat, no data; everything we do is just based on his feeling about things. He's not even 30 yet, but I feel like talking to a stubborn 60yo everytime I discuss an idea.

It really annoys me that many tech recruiters do not have a basic knowledge of the roles they are trying to recruit for and what skill set to look for when they cold message/call potential candidates on LinkedIn.

I make it very clear on my profile that I am a Full Stack Engineer. Still, every other day I get messages about Data Engineering, Frontend Dev or SRE roles. Sometimes a recruiter would insist that I schedule a call with them before they tell me the details, and then I would realize after the call what an absolute waste of time it was.

I have a lot of respect for recruiters. It's not an easy job. But I'm starting to strongly believe that tech recruiters should be made to go through a specialized training to make life easy for themselves and to stop wasting time of people who are not even remotely suitable for their requirements.

!rant (I got down voted for this on Stack Overflow, so I try to discuss the issue with a more professional crowd.)

In a Software Engineering class, we had an assignment to read Parnas' seminal paper on modularization [0]. In this paper, two approaches of dividing a software into modules are discussed:

Traditional Approach: A flow chart is drawn to work out the single processing steps and the program's high-level flow. Then every processing step is turned into a module. This approach doesn't yield very good results.
New Approach: Every design decision will be turned into a module by the means of information hiding. This approach leads to much better results.

My personal interpretation of the term design decision is that the modules are identified as data structures rather than as processing steps of an algorithm. This makes sense, because data structures are much more suitable for information hiding then processing steps of an algorithm. (The information inside a data structure is hidden behind functions, whereas a function only hides more detailed processing steps and no information; the information is actually passed in as arguments.)

Why does the second approach work so much better than the first approach? Here comes my second interpretation: The single processing steps of an algorithm are not replaceable (and thus not reusable), whereas it's possible to convert data structures into other data structures.

And here's my question: Could that be the reason why software development using workflow engines (based on BPMN, for example) never really took off?

My personal experience is that the activities created in such workflows are hardly ever reused, but there often are big data structures passed around all the involved activities, even if most of the activities use only one or two of them.

My question exaggerated: Could we get rid of all those clumsy workflow engines by giving managers Parnas' paper to read?

[0]: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (Parnas 1972)

I'm Angularjs and .NET developer. I'm planning to learn addition skill / tool.
Options are:
1) MEAN Stack
2) React (and related)
3) ML / Data Science
4) Django

Why Mean?
Because it'd easy for me to grasp and I can easily get projects for it.

Why React?
Always curious about React, because of the hype maybe. But really wanna learn. And some gap for React developers.

Why ML/DS?
Tbh, I suck at Mathematics and Statistics. Why ML / DS just because it sound fascinating.

Why Django?
Enough with JS JS JS, what else?

Please give your suggestions :)

OK I need some help. I need to make sure I’m not losing my mind.

We are using an ERP which is hosted by another company. We are supposed to be able to access the data via a REST API. This works fine using Insomnia or Postman, but when I attempt to hit the API from my web application, CORS blocks the localhost origin.

I contacted the company’s technical team to request that they change the CORS configuration to allow localhost. They keep running me around in circles telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because localhost isn’t a DNS resolvable name and I’m doing something wrong and they don’t need to change any configuration.

They insist that if anything would need white listed, it would be my IP, not localhost.

I sent them screenshots and stack overflow posts and documentation links, showing them exactly what headers need to be set and where the configuration needs to be set in the ERP. They tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

They tell me that if I can hit the API from Postman, I can hit it from my browser.

Am I losing my mind? Have I fundamentally misunderstood CORS all these years? I’m sure I’m right. But I’m starting to feel like I’m crazy.

At some point I need to do an older project i've had on hold a while, but it'd require writing my own ROM patch system as a major step in completing it, as i'd need to dynamically patch stuff into older games based on system, which current patch formats don't allow for. (This project will also help me learn a few things I need for yet more projects I've got stashed away, so it needs to happen eventually.)

Now, the interesting part: the patch format. I was debating on whether to use binary data, like IPS/BPS and similar formats do, which would be easier to implement... but if I were to have plaintext patches, you'd be able to not only understand what's happening, but also have things like scripting and conditionals and user-defined options and such. This would be WAY harder to implement, slow as fuck, and require an assembler per-target-system, either external or internal... but it'd be transparent, editable, and hella extendable.

This would all happen after I'm both over my burnout AND done chewing through my current stack of projects and such, of course, but still... which sounds better to you, dear reader?

nothing new, just another rant about php...
php, PHP, Php, whatever is written, wherever is piled, I hate this thing, in every stack.

stuff that works only according how php itself is compiled, globals superglobals and turbo-globals everywhere, == is not transitive, comparisons are non-deterministic, ?: is freaking left associative, utility functions that returns sometimes -1, sometimes null, sometimes are void, each with different style of usage and naming, lowercase/under_score/camelCase/PascalCase, numbers are 32bit on 32bit cpus and 64bit on 64bit cpus, a ton of silent failing stuff that doesn't warn you, references are actually aliases, nothing has a determined type except references, abuse of mega-global static vars and funcs, you can cast to int in a language where int doesn't even exists, 25236 ways to import/require/include for every different subcase, @ operator, :: parsed to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for no reason in stack traces, you don't know who can throw stuff, fatal errors are sometimes catchable according to nobody knows, closed-over vars are passed as functions unless you use &, functions calls that don't match args signature don't fail, classes are not object and you can refer them only by string name, builtin underlying types cannot be wrapped, subclasses can't override parents' private methods, no overload for equality or ordering, -1 is a valid index for array and doesn't fail, funcs are not data nor objects when clojures instead are objects, there's no way to distinguish between a random string and a function 'reference', php.ini, documentation with comments and flame wars on the side, becomes case sensitive/insensitive according to the filesystem when line break instead is determined according to php.ini, it's freaking sloooooow...

enough. i'm tired of this crap.
it's almost weekend! 🍻

I need advice. I'm to create a web application with an interactive map (lots of polygons to put on it, with markers and other map things) with a large amount of data and it is expected to have frequent changes to the said data. I have no idea of the tech stack to be used and the performance of the app is the biggest concern. (I'm thinking maybe to create an API, use MongoDB, then create a web client for it but I'm not that sure). Please give me your insights.

ANYONE WHO ANSWERS IS A HERO! Im having a CSS issue and yes I’m a CSS noob! I have a flex box with two columns of data and I want the divs to stack when the screen gets narrow enough. The issue is that I want them to stack ordered by a data attribute. I wrote a media query like this

@media (max-width: 767 px) {
.row { flex-direction: column};
.row div { order: attr(data-ordinal) };
}

I want each of the divs to be ordered by the data-ordinal attribute (a number) when the screen gets at most 767 pixels or on a mobile device. I was banging my head for a while on this assshole. Can anyone find the issue here? I may have left out a few details but does this CSS at least LOOK ok? I’m new to media queries. PS sorry, whats the bot that does the highlighting? I forgot it, but luckily this is simple enough to read

!rant apologies

I am a third year computer science student and I'm interested to see how professionals think I stack up against grads they have worked with straight from uni.

I have spent 15 months at a web company working on bespoke solo products on LAMP stacks. I know html, css, JavaScript and its library JQuery very well (I know JavaScript is massive to be saying I know it well)

I am reasonable at PHP and MySQL. Currently I am studying node.js and building an api that mashes up data from other APIs to build a new service. I'm also working on a C# Microsoft framework bespoke website. I know git to a reasonable level - branches, merges, rollbacks and all that jazz.

I am also studying development architectures to try and be more useful.

So if you guys came across a new grad that knew HTML, css, JavaScript, JQuery, maybe angular js, PHP, basic Linux commands, MySQL, C#, dev architectures, agile methods, node.js, git and has 15 months experience working on small to medium sized solo projects would you want to hire them?

Point to note I'll probably graduate first class (80%+) from a mid range uni.

Sorry, I know this is not the place but I like this community.

I swear I touched some weird and complex programming shit in over a decade of programming.
I interfaced myself through C# to C++ Firmware, I wrote Rfid antennas calibration and reading software with a crappy framework called OctaneSDK (seems easy until you have to know how radio signal math and ins and outs work to configure antennas for good performance), I wrote full blown, full stack enterprise web portals and applications.with most weird ass dbs since the era of JDBC, ODBC up to managed data access and entity framework, cloud documental databases and everything.

Please, please, please, PLEASE I BEG YOU, anyone, I don't even have the enough life force to pour into this, explain me why the hell Jest is still a thing in javascript testing.

I read on the site:
"Jest is a delightful JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity."

Using jest doesn't feel any delightful and I can't see any spark of focus and simplicity in it.

I tried to configure it in an angular project and it's a clustefuck of your worst nightmares put togheter.

The amount of errors and problems and configurations I had to put up felt like setting up a clunky version of a rube goldberg's machine.

I had to uninstall karma/jasmine, creating config files floating around, configure project files and tell trough them to jest that he has to do path transformations because he can't read his own test files by itself and can't even read file dependencies and now it has a ton of errors importing dependencies.

Sure, it's focused on simplicity.

Moreover, the test are utter trash.

Hey launch this method and verify it's been launched 1 time.
Hey check if the page title is "x"

God, I hate js with passion since years, but every shit for js I put my hands on I always hope it will rehab its reputation to me, instead every fucking time it's worse than before.

The company wants to implement a CRM with the cleansing rules built and managed by the business. What software did you buy or stack did you build on; for business directed data cleansing? We are a Microsoft shop but we can adapt is the solution is in the “magic quadrant”.

I have my first tech interview on Thursday and I am very nervous. I am a full stack web dev student at a CC who is finishing my program next quarter. I switched careers so this is not my first rodeo.It's for a role of technology specialist and gave a vague description of uploading data to the mainframe and working directly with developers and QA.Only skill question the recruiter asked was how well I know SQL. Great company and location for me. What can I expect? I know they are going to do an assessment but I am unsure if it will be programming based.

I've heard all kinds of arguments for about how whiteboard coding interviews should be obsolete, and that they usually doesn't reflect how good you are as a developer. But I've been polishing my skills with data structures and algorithms for a few weeks (learning this stuff for the second time since years ago in college) and I get this feeling that I'm becoming a much better programmer by practicing these things. And having access to all these things in the "working memory" of my brain has made me now think of solutions I couldn't before. But then - it may be that right now I'm working on embedded systems so this efficiency matters much more, earlier while doing full stack web development I didn't care about these much except while playing with strings maybe. So it might be dependent on your niche. What do you guys think?

One of those debugging days where minutes feel like hours, and hours like days.

I had the bad luck of being asked to dive into a legacy project which was unmaintained for months, but of course it's still on prod. And very suddenly the urgent need arrises to change stuff.

Yet: the docker stack won't work. It builds fine but the stack crashes.

Long story short: some internal api URI were renamed and at some point one internal api started to always require an access token. Which we set for the stage, prod env yet somebody forgot to mention that to the devs of legacy-project.

That ain't too bad.

WHAT IS FUCKING BAD IS THAT YOUR SHITTY APP SWALLOWS THE ERROR MESSAGE!

I mean it's bad enough I have to `var_dump && die` your app since you never bothered to setup a xdebug that I could use out of the box, yet egregious fact that your app would catch a valid exception but transforms it into an "internal warning" is borderline insane!

It's ok to throw exceptions. It's ok to let your service die. That's how other will know what and where to fix it. (You may want to restrict the data visible to the outside, but that's a whole different conversation.)

Back when I was starting out in a full stack role, I worked on a fairly big chunk of functionality that would trigger off a few entry points. It was wonderful for a few months. As we approached go live, our QA team started reporting weird intermittent issues. The logic wouldn't "trigger" the first time, but would on subsequent saves. Worse yet, the state required resetting of data every time we needed to test. Three weeks later, it boiled down to a 2 second time difference between the database's GETDATE() values and the new Date() object we passed in from our application.

I'll never forget that one system should be the source of truth again.

A register machine with strings and hashmaps as the only data types and no stack. You have to make one from a linked list of hashmaps.

Something annoying about the Node.JS and express stack: no way to globally catch errors using middleware.

I mean, you can try. There's even specific middleware designed for it. However, it only catches synchronous errors. So basically only controllers that don't fetch or upload any sort of data and just return some static view or whatever.

ASP.Net middleware chain is so much more robust :(

Need advice:

So I’m 20 years old. Got a decent job as software engineer with a really good pay and really want to break into machine learning.

Mastered NodeJS (my stack has always had node for the past 5-6 years) and I’m finding it difficult to switch to python for machine learning since things are so engraved in my head in javascript.

Aside from the syntax when I’m watching tutorials or reading books, I see data scientists and mathematicians make design mistakes in their code and it hurts my eyes and triggers my ocd.

I need tips on how to put my mindset in a moldable state so I can judge less and learn more and absorb data. Like you know that philosophy that when u get old your brain can’t learn things as fast anymore? I feel like that’s already happening to me rn at the age of 20.

I really want to switch my career from being a Full-Stack python/javascript developer to be a Data Engineer.

I've already worked with relational and non-relational databases, troubleshooted a couple of Airflow DAGs, deployed production-ready python code but now I feel kinda lost, every course I start on the Data engineering topic feels really useless since I feel like I've already worked with that technology/library, but I'm still afraid of start taking interviews.

Any good book/course or resource that I should look in?

BTW first rant in a couple of years, this brings me memories

I've just joined a new company out of despair after several month out of jobs without being able to even get interviews.
I've been warned about the code being a bit behind with modern Android stack, they needed to migrate from rx to coroutine and compose is not a priority at the moment.
Fine with it, I like handling and planning migration, that's a nice challenge.
But if only that were the only problems !! Far from it, the code is a formidable mess, I've never seen so much amateurism... Most of it was written from the previous Lead Dev who stayed there for years and touched everything with their very bad practices.
I don't even know where to start honestly...
While the code is in Kotlin, it stink Java. Nothing wrong about Java, but if you code in kotlin, you need to understand what kotlin try to achieve. And that's not the case here. There is freaking nullable everywhere, for no reason at all, the data classes contains lot of var in their constructors, equals are override to compare only one or 2 params and no hashcode override with it.
Sealed class, what for ?! Let me just write a List<Pair<Enum, Any>> and cast your any depending on the enum !
Oh and you know what, let's cast everywhere, no check, and for once no null safe, there is enough nullable in the code !

What about the reactive part ? well let's recreate a kind of broken eventbus with rx ! Cause why not ?!
The viewmodel observable don't contain data, they just contain enum for the progress of the states we're checking.
In the viewmodel function we update that enum states and emit it to be observed and make the data available as a var for the view to pick it up when needed.
But why put the business logic in the viewmodel, let's put in the views, and grab and check the variable contain in the viewmodel whenever it fits.
Testing the business logic ? uh let me just test my variable initialisation in the viewmodel instead.
The vm, the views, make about 2000 lines, the test over 3000, and not a single test really test the business logic in it ! I've made big refactoring we're all the tests stayed green, while the function are full of side effects ! WTF ?!
Oh and what about that migration from rx to coroutine ? well better not break the existing code and continue writting like rx, everything is cold flow ! We just need to store a boolean saying if we already did our call to the data layer then we decide to start our flow or not.
As for the RecyclerView, having too many viewHolder is just so annoying, let's put all our different views in one, and hide what we don't need.
Keystore has been push on the repo, but it's private no ? So who cares ?!
And wait i'm not done ! Some of the main brick of the apps depends on library that hasn't been updated for years, and you know what... yes they were hosted on Jcenter and it's only now that they decide to do something about it, we we're warned about the sunset of jcenter 2 years ago !!!!
So what about compose ? What do you want with compose ?! there is no design system in that app obviously, so don't even think about it !
And there... among all of that mess, I'm supposed to do code review... how the fuck do you do a code review when all the code that is around stink ?!
And there is so much more but by now I'm afraid you're thinking i'm just pissing on the old code like everyone... but damn I guarantee, that's the worst code I've ever seen, and i've work on more than 15 app from small to big on different contract with a lot of legacy code, but nothing that bad !

Yo, DevRat! Python is basically the rockstar of programming languages. Here's why it's so dope:

1. **Readability Rules**: Python's code is like super neat handwriting; you don't need a decoder ring. Forget those curly braces and semicolons – Python uses indents to keep things tidy.

2. **Zen Vibes**: Python has its own philosophy called "The Zen of Python." It's like Python's personal horoscope, telling you to keep it simple and readable. Can't argue with cosmic coding wisdom, right?

3. **Tools Galore**: Python's got this massive toolbox with tools for everything – web scraping, AI, web development, you name it. It's like a programming Swiss Army knife.

4. **Party with the Community**: Python peeps are like the coolest party crew. Stuck on a problem? Hit up Stack Overflow. Wanna hang out? GitHub's where it's at. PyCon? It's like the Woodstock of coding, man!

5. **All-in-One Language**: Python isn't a one-trick pony. You can code websites, automate stuff, do data science, make games, and even boss around robots. Talk about versatility!

6. **Learn It in Your Sleep**: Python's like that subject in school that's just a breeze. It's beginner-friendly, but it also scales up for the big stuff.

So, DevRat, Python's the way to go – it's like the coolest buddy in the coding world. Time to rock and code! 🚀🐍💻

Hey guys is there anything we as devs could do regarding this covid-19 situation in terms of our technical skills? Like any project or something for making awareness at global or local level, or some status update regarding various things/items that are affected by this pandemic?

I am looking for ideas or currently ongoing projects that i could contribute to. Currently my tech stack is limited to java, python , android and a little bit of basic data analysis, but i am fluid enough to learn and contribute.

Hi Guys if you can share your opinion/experience in what I wrote below it would help me a lot, thanks !

Im a full-stack developer with 4 years of experience, worked with different technologies in backend, frontend, mobile etc.. so I have general knowdgele of how systems works and how they should be built.

So I work as CTO in a startup, Im for almost 2 years here I started here with minimum salary (I decided that, because they said to me we are startup and such things so I wanted to help) 2.2k Euros and it has been almost 2 years without pay rise, so last month I asked for pay rise, but they said to me that they dont have money and sent me +300 euros as gift.

One week ago I wrote to them again (co-founders) that I have a lot of pressure and I dont know if I can handle all of that for much time he told me that I got +300 euro pay rise (which it was gift from them in first place, I refused them to sent this to me), but TODAY CEO and Co-Founder wrote to again me asking if I accept +300 euro pay rise because they can afford to pay me 2.5k or if I dont accept this they can sent me 2.2k again (they think that 2.5k is maximum that they can pay me right now and that this is enough for me).

I want to ask you guys what would you do, would you accepting something like this, considering that right now Im only dev here (yes Im only dev) and Im taking care of these(yes all of these) :

1. Company Website (react js)
2. Web Admin Panel (that clients use to manage their data)(react js)
3. Web Application (that visitors use to see client data)(react js)
4. Widgets (some code that is integrated into clients websites it's same as application, but integrated directly to client website)(react js)
5. Backend of all 3 apps mentioned above (asp.net core)
6. AWS Architecture( some of services : Cognito,Lambda,RDS,API Gateway,CloudFront,S3)
7. DevOps Role

Also consider that I didnt take holidays for 1 year now working on weekends too :)

I'm in a big fat fucking stinking rut, as in progress on this project has absolutely stagnanted.

Gonna rubber face your duck now **UNZIPS** excepts I don't have zippers, as joggers are the one true way; fake Adidas til I fucking drop.

Brain damage aside, I understand both how I've layed out the data and what I'm supposed to do with it. We have a virtual machine, an array of instructions and arguments for a given process within it, and we need to walk this array and map values to registers.

We also need to spill values inside registers to stack, IF they are required at a further point within that block. This also isn't terribly complex. We simply look forward in the array and see if the value is an argument to any instruction that *needs* this value to be loaded (ie, within a register).

So this implies multiple iterations; we need to better understand how one particular value is used throughout an F before we can make a final decision on how many registers and stack space are actually needed for the whole block.

Here's where it gets tricky. If there's a call, we need to be certain that the symbol being invoked has already been fully processed. Besides the obvious fact that recursion fucks me up, there's another matter: say a private method gets invoked by another private method. We can take advantage of this, by which I mean, sacrilege incoming so put on this toga.

Looking at the output for C compilers, it would seem this is not done in practice, I would assume because it's a pain in the ass. But when you have the guarantee that F will only be called internally, as that's what "private" means, there's two ways it can go:

0. It's well below the 13-20 cycle threshold, so you inline the fucker. No suprises there.
1. It's a more involved affaire, and invoked in more than one place, so you don't inline it. Codesize matters.

Recursion and [1] are the big deal things holding me back. Not because it's too hard, like I said this is kindergarten level abstraction. I'm just slow and fanatical, which is how I prefer to spell "constant obsessive paranoid delusions". I can see the potential optimization I can pull here, so I'm stuck trying to figure it out.

Idea would be, handling the register allocation and stack spill for an internal-internal (or deep internal; what we like to call a "guts" method) in synchronization with the *calling* processes. This is, fundamentally, violating all conventions -- but so under the hood no one will notice.

Let me give you an example. If we were to pass some value to a function, expecting to mutate it and get a different value back, in a lot of cases it'd be stupid to make an implicit copy by using two registers, one for input and another for the output. Dude, it's one cycle. Multiply it by a million, say sixty times per second, for every time you __needlessly__ make a copy of a value that we've already stated is mutable.

Clearly unacceptable. This is, in the strictest sense, everywhere in every single codebase. Premature micro optimization is the root of all goodness, God is great and praiseworthy. So how do we go about it?

Answer is I know and I don't know. By which I mean to say, this very thing I've done by hand. Assembly is fun. Now the issue is teaching a calculator how to do it. Not so fun.

There is a dependency chain between processes, as I believe I've kind of alluded to. I'm trying to make decisions on the side of the caller depending on the details of the callee, which is why recursion is rawdogging my soul. This is the same situation, it's inverting the direction of one or more links in the dependency chain, which makes no fucking sense.

And yet it does.
Brain, explain yourself.

How do *you* handle this without crashing?
Brain?

<<ME STEWPED; BEEP-BOOP>>

Alright then, that was a useless attempt at fuckery. Let's have a nap then, maybe it'll come to me in the morning. That's what I've been saying to myself for almost a month now.

Perhaps it is a hardcoded fuk.

Hey errrbody!!!

I'm banging out a couple "showcase" mobile apps for practice, portfolio, and/or as potential templating tools.

I have no issue writing the code, I just wanted to see if I could get a couple pointers as far as user databases go. I'd like to have some "user profile" features generated from a FB...vlike profile images, name, address, contact, yadda yadda yadda. I usually use Firebase, but I am still having a little trouble with the more advanced stuff when it comes to integrating users profile data. I can get values from Google and whatnot, but I'd like to see what my other options are on the smaller scale.

I am currently writing code in Flutter/Dart, ReactJS( not native!), Vanilla Js, Python, and CPP.

I know there's options for client side storage like Shared Prefs, Sqflite, etc, as well as server/DB side stuff like Firebase, Aws, Mongo, Node, SQL, etc- you get the idea.
I just want something with decent documentation that's reliable, not a massive undertaking (at least not for all this little stuff, anyways) and could potentially be a go-to platform configuration in the future. It'd be cool to wire in my Flutter and js shit of possible, bit honestly I'm cool with having separate setups for the time being. Any extra input regarding the use of python and/or cpp as well (either separately or with mobile) would be rad as fuck!!!
I do realize it's a pretty vast area to cover, but I figured it couldn't hurt to see what everyone likes to use for full-stack setups.
Thanks!!!!

Is it a problem if you’re a “full stack” developer but the company you work for has your title as “data analyst”? Meaning your teams builds and maintains every aspect of a website that the company employees use in their daily jobs and all that...

I’m just curious how that affects pay, your resume, etc. New to all things tech related so please excuse my ignorance. I just haven’t seen that before.