I really dislike it when non-devs ask devs: "I don't understand. What could be so hard about coding?".

Grumble. FredFlintStoneGrumble.

"What could be so hard about coding?"

Pretend you have a bag. The bag has a limit on volume. There is also a weight limit of how heavy the bag can be. Now pretend you have an assortment of objects that have different weights and volumes. The total weight exceeds the weight limit of the bag. The total volume also exceeds the volume of the bag.

Describe a method for optimal choice of items to maximize the number of items.

Now assign a value to the items. Describe a method for optimal choice of item value in the bag.

At some point they will realize they don't know what the fuck they are talking about. You won't even have to say it.

I just keep silent.... I'd rather not waste my time & energy explaining

@Demolishun I'm dealing with code that 15 devs before me wrote horribly, lazily and spaghettily. Then my product owner thinks it's ok to put a 2-day time limit on it and call me fucked up when I'm not fast enough in solving it. What the fuck am I, a machine?

@CaptainRant 🫡 sorry bro

"you've activated my trap card!" proceed to bore them to sleep with the details

@CaptainRant I'd just get the specs and rewrite it

that's actually how I rewrite bad stuff. I read the codebase, extract the specs, then write my own version and use the old codebase as reference if I don't know how to do something

it's faster than refactoring

also tho not professional advice. you do you

@jestdotty It's a good idea to rewrite but they put serious time constraints on me.

@CaptainRant normally you're even too time constraint to investigate if a rewrite is an option.

@jestdotty rewrite projects go fine privately with all time in the world. But rewrites where I worked on myself in professional setting (all?) failed. It's always underestimated how much cycles of bug fixes the original software had and will be introduced in your new one. I do rewrite C often instead of refactoring tho because it's much likely less work because C code is very specific. A fundamental change can cause a rewrite very well. Python is the ultimate refactor language.

Regarding topic: I do not ever get that question. Most people are aware that not all software is as even simple to make. Most do understand there's a difference between developing paint and photo shop. Still, I made development looking easy enough that every former partner I had tried to become dev like me. But they all failed because money was the motivation. Also, at certain point they notice how far behind

@jestdotty I would not convert code to less lines for fun if it works tbh. It's not that important for me. If it calls same query in a loop or smth is a different case of course (like my project does https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...) but all queries are 0.01s or so. I finally had some use for union queries! I always questioned myself, when to use an union? Well, if rants and topics are different tables that both contain the field 'text' what you need to compile all content per user. In the dataset you can see how much data whole devrant generates in a few weeks. It's a lot actually. Devrant dead? I had 315 mentions in two weeks. You 108 (have the file on the background open). Not weird we're spending some time here

@jestdotty Last 8 days we had around 80+ unique users doing (let me check..comments+rants).

2161 comments and 228 rants making it a grand total of 2389. Unique contributions per user is in the dataset somewhere. Soon, we can ask that stuff to my bot. But at this moment, i get an internal crash of chromadb client, i really think it's a bug in their stuff since i'm not doing any mutation towards data I provide.

I say everytime two weeks, but it's retoorweeks. In reality it's 8 days of data were my statistics are based on. Or 7 days if it's mentioned for weekly stuff

@jestdotty Haha, see me saying the exact opposite regarding not knowing each other. In the Netherlands it was thus quite common to have 100-400 questions about yourself answered online. Around 2005 or so. THat's way more than stuff you'll see today. Let' hide that I smoke, could turn out bad for me because the many opinions these days. I say, back in day was opener. What you say only counts for anonymous social media maybe.

I do have more friends online than in real life tho. that's easy. Every friend in real life is automatically an online friend since everyone is there. I think we have more friends than ever if we consider talking fun with eachother enough to be considered a friendship. It depends on what definition of friend is. Don't forget we have the lonelynes epidemic, boys in US have less than one friend on average or such. You can have online firends, but still, i would say that's quite lonely. I do not see much friends, moved far away. But I have friends i can call always

easy answer, without diving into optimization, algorithms, or any technicalities

"imagine you're learning a foreign language. single grammar mistake means the application will crash (best case scenario)"

people with basic self-reflection should realize they're not 100% gramaticaly correct all the time even in their native language

I rarely hear people imagine coding is easy

Most common thing I hear is people imagine that you build something once and then it's done an will last forever

"Isn't that website DONE?" 🤣 is a common question.

(But if we're honest, us devs might not be better, for example I've heard defvs say "I wonder what devs at Craigslist do - that site has not changed in years" but it is probably under constant development)

@jiraTicket the mentality "everything has to change all the time" is also horrible