Unit testing be like "all tests passed"

Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...

PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look

* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *

Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.

* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.

How's your morning going? :)

Years ago, when I was a young developer, I was asked to design and implement a complex but usefull feature. It took me some time, but I was really proud of my creation. It passed all the tests and was approved for production deployment. However, while the code was deployed, the customer asked for it to remain disabled for a while.

Months passed, other features were added often breaking the one I created. But I was relentless. I've fixed it every time. I've kept it ready for great launch...

After a few years, when I was already working on a different project, I received an email about my feature. It turned out that everyone simply forgot about it. You might expect that it was finally turned on... Nope, that email was a kind request to remove that feature from code.

You know what's the difference between
- static page written purely in HTML with inline styling
and
- dynamic page generated in PHP, that actually loads data from MySQL database and is correctly styled in separate CSS document
on national level exam necessary to earn a title of technician?
ONE HACKING PERCENT!

Ok, backstory. So, few days ago I got results from that exam. To be honest, it was very, very easy so I wasn't worried at all, unlike some of my classmates who just don't understand programming at all (you need at least 75% to pass). Our task was to create database, write website in PHP that shows contents of that database and use CSS to give it a look that of example web page and run it on XAMPP. I've got result of 96% and while I was wandering what I've done wrong i hear my colleague almost screaming with joy "I passed! And I haven't even touched PHP. I was soooo sure I'll fail." So I asked him what's his result and he says 95%. And then another colleague said he got 95% without PHP. So, in other words what I thought to be the main task was worth 1%. Apparently, what was more important was for the page to look identical to the example, so I guess some examiners didn't even look into the source. And don't get me wrong, I don't wish my classmates had failed. That's not why I'm ranting. But why in the name of Ada Lovelace the task said to use PHP and all that if it weren't supposed to check our knowledge of programming in PHP? Sometimes I think the people who design these tests don't even know what they're doing.

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."

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

You know what's fucking scary?
If you change a big block of code and it compiles, all tests are passed and you don't even get a warning.
Just wasted 20 Minutes because I tried to look for a mistake

Unit testing be like "all tests passed"

The most disappointing (not so sure about upsetting) rejection was from none other than Google.

I was ecstatic when Google respond to my application by inviting me to an interview. If I recall rightly I had two pre-interview screenings, two technical interviews, and about four interviews with people. The people were great and the HR person I was dealing with was open that the feedback was all good.

And then the rejection came! I called the HR guy and asked what happened. He said there’s a central group somewhere who approve all hiring and they decided I hadn’t worked for a “big enough” company in the past.

Yet - my potential colleagues and manager thought I could do the job, I passed the Google-scale technical tests … and then some faceless person somewhere says “meh” and that’s that.

It’s not like they didn’t have my resume that whole time, or the opportunity to ask any questions they wanted !

So that sucked.

We passed a milestone: 250,000 phpunit testcases.

If it weren't for a heavily parallelized build pipeline which splits it out over 20 servers, it would take about 7.5 hours to complete.

Not hating on PHP, and without tests it would truly be hell...

But still, fucking hell, we outgrew PHP.

Not having a solid type system just means you either accept more bugs, or write thousands of unit tests to guard all the foundational cracks in the system.

On the bright side, I get a coffee break after every commit 😄

User: “I’ve tried hundreds of different names. How come all the usernames are registered?!😤”
Developer: ”I’m quite confident about my code. Can’t find any issue in this login form.🤔”
QA: “It passed all unit tests. We did a comprehensive testing on live server by registering all the possible names. What can go wrong?🙀”

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Has anyone felt the astonishing effect that is writing a whole bunch of test classes, hitting run for the first time and they all pass.

I'm kinda sitting here staring at my screen in disbelief, either these tests all passed, or I've really missed something and they passed anyway, or it's just a lying piece of shit trying to question my own abilities... all are possible right now.

And no, they are not " assert(1,1) "

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

Fucking first rant here:

So we tried to teach Two new colleagues to typescript and git and testing and stuff and we have a SPOC “which claimed to be very technical”. The SPOC’s task is to keep an eye on the work, and today we have had a review...

After two weeks, the created multiple branches into our git, all with one commit of 400 LOC changed, no merge requestet, issue in Redmine set to “closed”.
Well, by the way they were supposed to write Unit tests for our app.
But I thought, ok, we’ll check their branches.

Their tests all passed (cz) but man, the app didn’t and on compilation there were errors, the app is broken. Damn.

Is it really so far off, that even of They wrote tests, that the app should still work?
AND I THOUGHT IT IS COMMON SENSE. Damn!
Guess how needs to fix it

So the juniors finished a feature and it's okay, it passed all tests.

Now I'm cleaning their code and... I opened up a whole file with trash code that is either repetitive, or not even used. I decided to save it in case it breaks one of the features but... nope, everything seems to be running perfectly with just half of the code they wrote.

Bureaucracy is the biggest impediment to progress.

Instead of putting a brick wall in front of you by saying "The PO said that you created a bug", learn how to communicate and have a horizontal hierarchy, for fuck's sake.
Even if all my tests passed, they still throw other bugs in my face and call it my fault. Fantastic. I love Scrum. This is not Scrum, this is abusing and not respecting Scrum.

Stupid rules, stupid people.

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

I had no idea of how to implement the logic of a ticket. That's why I started with creating some unit tests that failed. Then I continued working until they all passed.

So it works now.

I have still no idea of how I implemented the logic.

We are not ready, I won't sign on this shit I said!

Release on Friday, what could go wrong? All unit tests passed they said!

It's Tuesday and shit is still broken!

FML

It's been broken in production for two weeks, and you want to tell me it's "drop everything urgent" now? Is it important? Yes. Is it urgent? No.

Also, how the fuck did you not know this was broken for two weeks, and what the hell do you want me to do about it now? It's your codebase, it passed all the tests in staging AFTER I made my changes to the infrastructure.

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

!rant
So on the last day before launch our latest feature I'm informed that a requirement was missed and it had to be implemented before go live otherwise the business didn't want the feature. The feature in question was pretty drastic and basically required a scheme rewrite, new tables, etc. So I spent the entire day making the change.

Thankfully I pushed the whole project for good code coverage. Therefore, all I had to do when I was done was run all of our tests and make sure they passed. *warm fuzzy feelings*

That joy of finally having them all passed.
I had stupid mistakes like: insertNewItem, but inside I use update T_T

project still fairly new, but this time I decided to write unit tests as I go instead of delaying till the end and writing nothing lol

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Had a coding challenge for an interview. 2 questions and I passed all the tests on both questions. But I got an email from the recruiter saying that one of my questions didn’t have a working solution??? Wtf it passed all the tests, am I retarded?

All tests passed, and the delivery is in on time. See you next week!

Month passed so I looked at job offers and I am tired again.

All of them look the same and all of them look like crap. Some require stupid online tests preparation ( cause everyone likes to traverse tree 10000 times a day ).

Seriously I think I will go to supermarket and work there.
It’s more pleasant then getting input and pushing it in some stupid places all over again.
Finding some shit in shit pile, then moving this shit pile back and forth between different shit holes.

AI should start writing this stupid code, robots should provide food and build shelter.
The sooner the better for all of us.

All tests passed. Now I can sleep peacefully.

Just had a class where we had to write a heap adding algorithm in Java to reduce rounding error for x amount of floats being added together

After an hour of writing code with no testing anything I finished. Ran the JUnit tests provided by the teacher and it passed all the tests!

Who says it can't work the first time?

tests? ain't nobody got time foh dat. my brain already does all the job. it assumes and says to myself "all tests passed ✅" whenever i make quick changes

i like to live dangerously 😂

Call me a novice, but isn't the point of a user story to be concise, limited in scope and only concerning one purpose? Kind of like a class should only have one responsibility.

This stupid other reviewer developer comes whining at me saying I broke some shit in my user story and that I need to fix it. The weirdest part is that I didn't break anything. I wrote all my tests, they all passed and yep, this guy has the nerve to come and say that I broke other shit. Well genius, if it's OTHER SHIT, then it belongs as a bug in ANOTHER STORY. What the fuck man, seriously.
A few minutes of debugging later, I found out it was someone else who broke some code earlier on a piece that was part of my part of the application.

Why are others so quick to blame? This is unprofessional. OMG I DISCOVERED AN ERROR, YOU'RE PROBABLY THE ONE TO BLAME BECAUSE YOU'RE AN IGNORANT GUY BECAUSE YOUR TITLE IS JUNIOR DEVELOPER!
Right.

Companies like these, people, have bad communication. Bad companies.

DO NOT, i repeat, DO NOT USE "scapy.all" in python3.

I spend hours figuring this one out. In one commit i added tests and other tests not connected to my tests started failing. I ran the tests several times and also checked the rng-states, but everything was the same as on the commit before...
There was one additional error message i decided to check out, which was the result of "import scapy.all" (that's a module that contains all the scapy-exports). I removed that import and used the right packages and suddenly: all tests passed.

Fuck this inconsistent piece of crapware that has its python2-files in the pip3-repo and gave me that hell to debug.

So working for a company and the dev team I’m apart of works on a legacy rails app. Technical debt is high, no automated tests, no proper routing and also running unsupported versions of the language.

I joined seven months ago and got the current team doing automated testing so that’s a plus, they bought this app four years ago and there’s been no language updates, testing, cleanup, security updates, nothing, just adding to bad code.

Now we’re looking to actually upgrade language versions, the language and the framework now this will cause a lot of stuff to break naturally due to how outdated it is.

So I started putting proper routes into place how things should of been when things were being built as we have some spare time I decided to go out of my way to clear up some of the technical debt to get ahead of the curb. Re-done an entire section of the app, massive speed improvements, better views, controller, model, comment clean up and everything exactly how it should be.

I push the PR,
*other dev* - “why are we doing all of these other changes”
*me* - “well to implement routes properly, we have to use the new routes I just did some extra cleanup along the way”
*today, me* - “can you lend me a hand with one of the routes the ID isn’t getting passed”
*today, other dev* - “this wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t redo all these files, let’s just scrap the changes”
…

Sooo, I’ve spend three weeks improving one section in the app, because I’m having issues with one route according to this dev I should scrap it? Wait come again, am I the only one in this team who cares about making this app better all round?

Frustrating…

My math teacher.

Simple story: His way of teaching was like bible study - he dictates the mathematical rules, the students had to write it down _exactly_ as told.
(Yes. He even dictated spaces / newlines / ....).

Had him for many years....
Since I was the rotten apple in class (I was always very weak regarding math), he had joy in mobbing me specifically.

It was one of the reasons I never thought about programming at all - or to be more precise, I _feared_ programming since everyone told me it would require intense knowledge of math.

Well. Fast forward. I went to university despite my fear, just because I was too stubborn to prove my math teacher right.

He was one of the counseling teachers too - and he made _very_ clear that I would fail in _anything_ regarding mathematics job wise.

I failed university, yes.

I gave up simply because I was too bored to learn and replay stuff by heart you'll certainly never need to remember your whole life.

Math played a role, too. Since I lacked the whole mathematical background, I barely passed the tests (mostly by a point).

But thanks to a lot of friends I learned that mathematics is helpful for programming - but not a must.

After giving up university, I started an apprenticeship.

And while I dreaded the decision for a long time, I couldn't be more happy about it.

Boss wanted our AES implemented to use an Initialization Vector. I changed the implementation to add an IV and all the tests passed on the first try!

I changed the implementation to fail just to make sure I wasn't getting false positives.

Colleague wrote all his test cases after finishing his code and set expectedOutput to garbage. His tests failed, printing actualOutput. Then he just replaced the garbage expectedOutput with actualOutput. Bingo bango, all tests passed.

"How do you like me now TDD?"

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

IDK if this counts as a meeting

Last year, I was in my first uni year. In this subject, we had to do this project and then have to meet with our teacher to talk about what we've done in it, as a way to see if we really did the work and/or if we both had done it.
So me and my colleague get to the room and sit down. He starts asking questions. My colleague answers. I freeze.
I'm a bit socially awkward and anxious to the point it kinda incapacitates me when I'm subjected to some sort of social pressure (read: evaluations). At some point, the teacher turns to me and says "you haven't been talking. Did you let your colleague do it all by himself?", and I faintly respond "No", so he redirects his questions to me.
To tell the truth I was kinda off the loop for the second part of that project, I barely could get anything done and I felt so bad about it. I'm used to doing all the work so not being able to do anything is so frustrating.
He starts asking me stuff and I forget what I studied for it. I just... forgot. I do not cope well with evaluations where I have to actually talk to people. I do fine on tests.
So he turns to us after the trainwreck that were my answers and says "your work is not good. At all. You may fail the subject. I have to see the first part again, but this isn't looking good for the both of you" (the work was to be delivered in 2 parts). I was crushed. I went home and I just cried out of frustration and fear.
We had a 13 in the work. We both passed the subj. I don't think there was any moment I was so scared to see a grade and so relieved to see that I've made it.

Confession - Testdriven UnitTests
First of all, I regret all and wish there would be no SQL Scripts but an external tool to analyze data, but the project grew hysterically and when I joined the sh*t had already been established...
I had to test some SQL Scripts. As there is no real UnitTest framework which is under development/gets support, the whole suite is kinda buggy.
So I had my script, and had the required input + expected output, but the UnitTest always failed. So I manipulated the framework parameters until the test finally passed.
Shame on me and on the project, but atleast there are tests now...

I. Fucking. Hate. Tests.

I am writing a module according to a standard and this standard has a test suite. Awesome...this should make development go pretty smoothly especially since their human-readable "specification" is severely lacking.

I get the module passing most of the tests...however there are few I just can't get my module to pass, no matter what...well fuck.

I go digging deeper into the test cases, compare it to source code. What's this? The tests are fucking wrong. There are several other implementations that use this test suite, how the fuck have they not caught this?

Also come to find out, it is not possible to pass *all* the tests in the suite because some are for older versions that have different functionality.

Got to love a test suite that is incorrect and can't be passed 100%

Maybe they need tests to make sure the tests are working correctly.

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

Everybody's talking about the 50/50 for some reason, so here's my 2 cents. I've been trying to hire another senior front-end engineer for my team for over two months, and not one half-competent candidate passed our tests yet*. The first one to pass, and I don't care whether it's a male candidate, a female one, or a type of asexual sentient mushroom spore, will get the job.

We do prefer a female candidate because our team is all male at the moment. But that's not going to stop us from hiring a male one if we find anyone.

Also, out of 40ish candidates I've interviewed so far, I believe only 3 were female. Might be a fourth one I can't recall at the moment.

Ok... Can someone explain me this?
Happen a few weeks ago.
My pc would crach on any 3D program or game.
Did some tests, was the graphic card.
Send it to repair (amd, Asus made)
Placed my old Nvidia, installed drivers all good.
My new card came, nothing repaired, nothing found, passed all stress tests.
Placed the card back ok, no OS.
Bios detects both ssds but don't start (windows 10.... Ya tryed Linux but doesn't work for my main past time in pc, Arma 3).
Loaded the USB with the windows instalation, used command line drive C is completely empty but has 160gb used.
Ended ip formating.
GC works perfectly.
So... Wtf happen?

Me: Code checked in, CI and tests passed, deployment kicked off. Huh maybe I won't have to stay late after all!

Production Web Server:

I accidentally removed an object file from the linker phase of a library we use, by messing with a variable in the Makefile. This meant that the library was completely unusable when loaded into a binary.

All of the tests in the library's build process still passed, though.

Thought it had been a while since my last Arch redo. Now the fsck output is hundreds of pages long and I'm grateful for my backups, and all suspiciously occuring just seconds after a full upgrade. I guess hardware failure is a possibility, but the smart status on the drive says it's perfect and dozens of retrospective self tests didn't reveal any issues. RAM passed multiple tests as well. Oh well, not like I haven't reinstalled before.

Learning Java in online course...
Have to do an assignment..

Thinking hard and stressing my mind to find the solution for past two days. Today, don't know how it happened. I just coded and got solution...

The moment my code passed the tests, All of my pain vanished.

I'm happy that I chose programming field 😇... Still lot to learn !!!!

- "You passed all the tests very well, we think you will be a big actor of our developement service. We propose you 28k€/y, and it's the best you could find on the market."
- "No, thank you."

1 week after, found for 38k€/y.

#Suphle Rant 11: Laravel board launch

The launch took almost 2 weeks more than originally slated, because I sought to install it manually, just as an outsider would. Installation steps had been documented, automated tests for the installation tests were passing. When time came to actually execute the binary from the terminal, we went from one obstacle to the other. First, were the relatively minor Composer/Roadrunner issues, eventually resolved by the helpful RR maintainers who sat with me through a Discord server for about 2 hours until their command ran the way I needed it to.

Next was the Psalm scare: One of my value propositions was the guarantee of eliminating all type related bugs in Suphle apps. I intended to use Psalm for that. Wrote tests as usual. Turns out the library behaves differently under conditions differing from raw CLI usage. I resurrected threads I'd opened since December that were left unattended, and with some help from the maintainer, we eventually got it to do what I need it to do.

I was all the more frightened by the fact that Transphporm had caused me to renege on one of my earlier promises. I can only miss so many targets. After this, the docs had to be updated with all the changes effected to accurately integrate those two. Project installation and initialization commands were ran rigorously to ensure all progresses smoothly.

Tagged one final release and suddenly became impatient to launch on our local Laravel group chat where I've been a member for the last 4+ years, where we've had a rollercoaster of emotions. In that time, I've refined my launch speech to suit that audience -- obviously, countless times. Not just a tame "It's my pleasure to announce what I've been working on", but near 40 messages going into details about the inner workings, why it was built, how it compares. An expose that dove deeper than I would anywhere else.

I scheduled a time for them to tune in and got some encouraging anticipation. Ended up deflated after posting the whole thing. Only about 5 persons interacted. 1 (who I've chatted with outside the board) was quite enthusiastic. Feverishly checked the docs but commented it was overwhelming and he'd need more time. Already starred the repository.

For some context, there are give or take 250 members on that board. Not all are active but activity there easily reaches a crescendo when the topic discussed is about inanities like what 3rd party services to use for SMS, how to receive salaries from abroad, or job openings. I was optimistic when the acquaintance mentioned above published a payment library and met a riotuous welcome as one of their own. Maybe, they are simply not fond of me and the speech should have been passed off to someone else.

I checked Packagist installs -- not more 10. For 3 years, I'd been hyped up for that night; but for some reason, the audience I considered myself closest to flopped, woefully. Thankfully, this isn't the main launch. I'm still holding out hope for that. If it fails, I would have sunk an immeasurable amount of effort and time, that nobody will compensate me for. That is the one place I go to see those more advanced than me in PHP. I constantly learn there and find stimulating conversations there.

Now, I can no longer predict reception from other presentations. All I can do now is hope

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

Immediately after the last major release, I enabled CheckStyle to fail on unused methods and variables, and then I proceeded to delete all dead code. The test suite passed and I got approval to merge. Two months later, the next major release went out the door…guess how that went :)

Using TDD or at the very least writing unit tests ensures your code won’t break, or go missing!

Spent like all week working on a feature set in a web app, finally got to a point where i thought it was functioning well, ran tests, tests passed.

I was exhausted but happy. All along i have been pushing to my GitLab server. I save my commits and even though exhausted, i am happy as i go to bed.

I wake up, run some errands and my business partner says, eh! Can i come see that new feature set you built, sure, i will be home soon.

I was at the barbershop, trying to look like a human being again. I get home boot my computer and i scream.....

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh

I check GitLab, i check my Git Log and i start to sweat, i was in the air conditioner but it felt like someone turned the heat up.

Git log shows my last commit was 2 days ago, my app is at the state it was 2 days ago and i can't frigging find all i have built.

I need to show this to the client, have no idea what to do now, so stressful. My partner say, you know what, just watch a movie. You built it before, you will do it again.

This happened to him a while ago and i gave him similar advice, it felt wicked hearing it now.

Anyways, i have to build that ish all over again, i do know i wasn't dreaming about having built it. I asked my wife and she said, i did, i was always working. So confusing.

Anyone experienced this before, i have no idea how to find my code.

Help Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

This is for the people with gsoc knowledge.

Short :gsoc2020, good for final year student?

Long:
So i am having a lot of doubts regarding my future career. I have done a few internship, have decent knowledge of java/python and some other tech stacks (android/ data analytics,etc) .
I always had the dream of being selected in gsoc, but i was always too late to start preparing/applying, being busy in college stuff(lame excuse, i know)

But this year seems i can try my chances. College is all focussed about students getting a job, so they are pretty lenient. If i dedicate my full time to GSOC, i might crack it. But i would then be playing all my cards on this , as I won't be focusing on other companies' interviews and placement tests. Plus from what i know, its whole timeline takes around 5-6 months and ends somewhere in August-September (the time at which my college would be ending and my other peers would be starting a full time job)

So is it worth for a final year student like me to go for gsoc? I know it does gives a good weight to the resume, but is a heavy resume with no job in hand better than a light resume with a job in hand, for a passed out student?

If i have 2 branches on git
- main
- infra

You cannot push directly to main. It is forbidden. You can only merge to main

Now. Once i push to infra branch. Assuming all the shit went good pipeline passed tests passed etc. Then i merge it to main.

Now

Locally while im on infra branch. I have to pull latest changes from main otherwise ill fuck up everything and cause conflicts.

After trial and error i realized i just have to do:
git fetch

This fetches all shits from main (defaukt branch) into infra branch. And now it works. No rebase. No pull. Wtf?

Is this the correct way to do it?

Also i need someone to explain this to me like im 5:
- git pull
- git pull --rebase
- git fetch

What is the difference between those 3 commands? I tried googling and chatgpting but i cant seem to understand any explanation. Explain it to me in simple terms with examples

My question is for all participants of today's codevita. Will i get a interview call if i have submitted 2 solutions and public tests are passed, but in pvt test cases i am exceeding TLE and MLE.

I think for this one i had higher expectations which let to me being disappointed. Was a fun experience nonetheless.

So i am junior dev in a bigish company and i am pretty comfortable where i am, its challenging enough and fun enough. Pay is fine nothing out of ordinary but perks are nice.

But this job is the one i got out of college and it did feel that i got really lucky as i was preparing for leetcode and what not but the interviewer was pretty linient and asked me technical questions out of my cv. The questions were mostly about what i used and all felt quite easy and i was offered a role with a decent salary. Since then i have been working and learning and thing been pretty stable.

Recently i was hinted at a promotion by my manager so i have been working towards that. I have in the past got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from different recruiters but never tried because i was satisfied with my job and my visa condition made it a little tricky to hope jobs ( i work in eu as a non eu citizen). But i did fantasize that if i could just get an interview with a decent company and clear the technical round without much preparing and get offered a decent package just to inflate my ego and maybe use that to increase my current package.

So i got another message on LinkedIn and a startup was looking for a developer and i gave it a go. I asked the recruiter what is the expected compensation and he instead asked me. I said i want a big enough increase tk even consider leaving my comfortable spot, so i am looking for more than 35-40% increase If they can then i am willing to try. The recruiter said that their range is between 25-35 but can try 40 if the interviews goes well.

I went ahead with it and gave the interview, the first one was simple and the next one was supposed to be technical and was told its not leetcode but i will have to implement a feature into a project live on the video call. Which i did with some success, i was quite clumsy but i was able to do it with tests passing sl i guess that was fine.

I was really happy that i didnt prepare much and still passed a tech interview. I was recently told about the offer, its around 40% more than my current but there are no yearly bonus or even health insurance. If i consider the bonus and health insurance then the offer becomes like 20% increase. Considering i am already expecting a promotion and some salary increase this offer seems really lack luster.

Just wanted to talk about all this, can you get a really big jump generally or is it only 15-25 ?