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

@retoor in terms of complexity hobby projects are far more complex than any professional ones I had

so I don't know. really depends if you got the specs right or not. cuz the difficulty won't be figuring out the logic, it'll be if the specs were clear and you missed a part. which is probably why part 1 of a rewrite was to do integration tests first and then you run them on the rewrite after if you had a lot of time

also professionally I had people give me 2 weeks to do something that took me 3 days in tools and domains I had no knowledge in... then that guy got chewed out by management instead of me getting a raise. cuz I was very good. actually some dude from some fancy company said I was "very smart" (but that was me before and not now post sick). probably others are not gonna experience it the way I'm describing. I would take other people's code and in some instances change 90 lines to 12... felt kind of bad I was throwing out their work lol, but less code is easier to maintain

@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

@retoor well that one in particular was using grunt for caching and I removed grunt and 12 other packages and just... asked the transpiler library directly to uhhh... give me the string of the generated content and just wrote it to file using std functions, bam caching

it's not lines like code golf it's that people do a lot of useless things and could just not be doing that

another one was a 4k+ file... and the guy kept rewriting the same logic 7 times. so I put it into a method and the file was 1.2k lines after lol. those ones are trickier though, because coupling stuff like that can reduce your agility later on when stuff changes, and it can be hard to figure out that certain functionality is the same or you might have to make an options because it slightly differs in some places

but normally I find people just use packages where native methods they already have at their fingertips would've been fine, or they don't know certain native methods exist

@retoor how about devrant in terms of unique user interactions?

I was around a bit when devrant was very popular. dead now considering you'd get 3k-6k upvotes on a post before, and now there's maybe 20 unique users since posts go up to about 20 upvotes

@retoor also in the old days nobody really knew each other. it was very impersonal. nobody discussed anything. it was one of those high capacity communities where everybody was showing off

but now that there's less users it's more "intimate" so to speak, so as consequence 100% people are having more interactions with the app, because it's more deep / intimate than thousands of users who don't know each other and would basically rarely see each other, other than the app celebrities (which kind of sucks I think cuz I don't like the whole celebrity thing, I think it becomes alienating and cult-like in a community)

@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