I was only seventeen back then and I was a Java Developer Intern, not knowing much about enterprise oriented coding.

The project leader in our dev team saw a lot of potential and passion in my work, but was convinced I wasn't taught enough to do the right thing.

I was mainly doing shitty mappers and services back then, which were somewhat used but never lasted long and were ditched a few months later, which always bummed me out. I wanted to make an impact on REAL projects that would deploy into production.

So Mister Mentor (GDPR forbid to use the actual name), who was always first to come and last to leave the office, taught me what it means to code for real.

We stayed after 5pm until 7-8pm multiple times a week and he taught me in a deeply understanding and calm way how to:
- Git (SVN)
- Refactor
- SOA
- Annotate
- Deploy
- Unit Test

And most importantly:
- How to debug like an absolute BOSS
(We even debugged native Java Libraries just for fun to see if we could break them)

Fast-forward a month later and little intern me made his first commit on production.

Without Mister Mentor, I wouldn't be half as good of a developer as I am today.

Week 26 advice - you all probably know this but good to refresh!

Eat healthily

Sleep well

Document clearly

Annotate your code

Use version control properly

Keep yourself in check with project management tools

Your peers are your friends... And competition.

As much as your boss is an idiot respect them and your life will be easier.

With great power comes great responsibility; don't touch that keyboard until you think through what you are doing chances are your first idea is not the best.

Don't write quick fixes and say you will go back to clean it up later on when you have time. That time will never come.

I'm currently rewriting perfectly clean and functioning Scala code in Java (because "Enterprise", yay). The amount of unnecessary boilerplate I have to add is insane. I'm not even talking big complicated code but two liners or the lack of simple things like a range from 5 to 10.

Why do I have to write
List<Position> occupiedPositions = placedEntities.stream()
.flatMap((pe) -> pe.occupiedPositions().stream())
.collect(Collectors.toList());
instead of simply
val occupiedPositions = placedEntities.flatMap(_.occupiedPositions)

Why on earth does `occupiedPositions.distinct` suddenly become a monstrosity like `occupiedPositions.stream().distinct().collect(Collectors.toList())` where the majority of code is pure boilerplate? And this is supposed to be the new and better Java8 api which people use as evidence that Java is now suddenly "functional" (yeah no, just no).

Why do APIs that annotate parameters with @Nullable throw NullPointerExceptions when I pass a null? Why does the compiler not help prevent such stupidity? Why do we use static typing PLUS those annotations and it still crashes at runtime like every damn dynamic, interpreted language out there? That's not unfortunate, it's a complete waste of time.

Why is a simple idea like a range from x to 10 (in scala literally `x to 10`) not by default included in Java? There's Guava's version of Range which does not have a helper for integer ranges (even though they are the most used ones). Then there's apache.commons version which _has_ a helper for integers, but is strangely not iterable (wtf I don't even...).

Speaking of Iterable: How difficult could it be to convert an abstract Iterable<T> into a concrete List<T>? In scala it's surprisingly `someIterable.toList`. I found nothing like that so I took to stackoverflow where I found a thread in which people suggested everything from writing your own ListUtils helper class, using Guava (which is a huge dependency!) to using the new Java8 features inline (which is still about three lines long). I didn't know this was such a hard problem in computer science, TIL.

How anyone can be productive in this abomination of a language is beyond me now, even though I've used it for many years while learning to code (back then I didn't know there were much better ways to do things). The only good part is that I have to endure this nonsense for only about 3 days longer then I'm free again!

Day 1 at internship:

Manager: Can you get this RFID tracking system working? We have the full source we just need it installed.
Me: Sure thing, shouldn't take too long if it's a working system.
Me: (opens VS project)

Code is a sprawling abyss devoid of any intelligible structure, commented with broken one-liners which serve only to annotate method names.

In Mandarin.

For the record the system was broken, took me several weeks to track down all the issues.

While reviewing a PR from one of our newer FE devs, I ended up spending more time than I would like mulling over its composition. The work was acceptable for the most part; the code worked. The part that got me was the heavy usage of options objects.

When encountering the options object pattern (or anti-pattern, at times) in complex scenarios, I have to resist the urge to stop whatever I'm doing and convert it to the builder pattern/smack them in the head with a software design manual. As much as I would like to, code janitor is one of the least valuable activities I engage in daily, and consistently telling someone to go back to the drawing board for work that is functional, but not excellent is a great way to kill morale. Usually, I'll add a note on the PR, approve it, add a brown bag or two on that sort of thing, and make attendance mandatory for repeat slackers. Skills building and catharsis all rolled up in a tiny ball of investing in your people.

Builders make things so much cleaner; they inform users what actions are available in a context; they tend to be immutable, and when done well, provide an intuitive fluent interface for configuration that removes the guesswork. As a bonus, they're naturally compositional, so you can pass it around and accumulate data and only execute the heavy lifting bits when you need to. As a bonus, with typescript, the boilerplate is generally reduced as well, even without any code generation. And they're not just a dumping ground for whatever shit someone was too lazy to figure out how to integrate into the API neatly.

They're more work in js-land, sure; you can't annotate @builder like with Lombok, but they're generally not all that much work and friendlier to use.

We had this new guy working and we assigned him some work to do. We gave him some time to find the way into the code and figure things out on his own.

Instead of doing that, he wrote a paper of 20 pages why WPF would be way better than what we are doing now. There were many flaws in his document as well. Also on day 2 he used resharper to format some code file. Bye bye annotate! His argument was that resharper knew better. But, our code also uses some reflection, so that got broken. He didn't knew what reflection was and assumed resharper "fixed" it.

He doesn't work here anymore now, he felt he wasn't taken seriously. This is just one of many examples of him though 😂

Sooo I’m typically a proponent of physical copy of books, as I’d rather sit and read them, write and take notes. Essentially all my books turn into something out of the “half blood prince” potions book from Harry Potter.

But it’s so inconvenient as either my books are in my office or in the library at home. It ends up being something like connecting a USB... the book I need at the time is always in the opposite place I am in currently.

Also, all the books I want now are newer and none are on the used market. For a reasonable price.

So I gave in a bought an iPad with the hopes of putting the books in pdf form on it... I’ll pay for some PDFs but hey if I can get it free thru a google search then it is what it is lol.

Not sure how I’m gonna adapt to reading on a tablet, as I really prefer a physical book.. hell I still use national brand computation notebooks for all my notes. Nothing beats writing it down, AND I still have an IBM selectric 3 and Swintec, nothing beats sitting down and just letting the thoughts flow neatly on a piece of paper and then glueing it the notebook

Anyway whatcha y’alls thoughts of using an iPad as a digital library of books.. using the Apple Pencil to annotate the book. I bought the 12.9 inch as the screen size is closest to a sheet of paper

Also, I don’t read fiction all the books I read are nonfiction, reference manuals, textbooks, data sheets, user manuals, stuff like the art of computer programming by knuth, Kent beck, Robert Martin, folwler books, etc

I love when teachers allows us to annotate on screen shares

I don't get why annotations are even allowed for local variables.

Reflection doesn't even work for local variables.

What's the entire purpose to annotate!!!
Am I missing something!!!

I've done it! I've implemented a new feature. I call it, wheal. its just like the wheel you know and love, in every way, shape, and form. But now, you can take comfort in knowing the state of the art has surely progressed, every time you go to reference, "wheal". This has the added benefit that others who may already be familiar with wheels, will have no trouble at all coming to terms with wheals. Just please, do not make reference to wheels, or your software will not compile. And also be sure to annotate all instances of wheals *wheals are just like wheels!* until all devs have been on-boarded.

Is there any free software or website one can use where it takes a screenshot or page and you can mark areas on it, then add comments to those areas? (kind of like powerpoint comments, but without the awkward canvas limitation)

Then later the viewer sees instead of huge message bubbles, only those marked areas on top of the screenshot and when he hovers them - sees the comment pop up somewhere.

I remember QA having something like that, but don't remember anything about it. (I think it had a palmtree logo?..)

It would be amazingly useful for clients to just go through screenshots and marking on it "that looks nasty, put ajit pai on it".

When, after trying and debuggin everything else, I realized in the shower, that I forgot to annotate my method.

I always print out a hard copy of whatever code I'm working on, then go through the code and annotate it with a pen until I feel that I have some insight... it's usually either that or I'll just walk away and come back later

At work, when I try to find the best place to implement some code, I read the current code to get why it's here, and if I'm at the right place to do my stuff.

Sometimes the previous dude writes a shitty code because, well, Drupal 8 and he didn't have much choices to make his stuff work.

But some other times just reading the code feels like double checking if I did all my vaccinations. When these moments occure, I activate the annotate mode in PHPStorm so I can see who wrote this piece of dumb shit code, so I can insult him in my head while doing my stuff.

Sorry pal, I'm not paid enough to write a WORKING code for you at your place, but at least you'd know that if you were drowning, I'd share my point of view about this planet's overcrowding. Fucker.

Worst experience: Learning how data is stored in segments in a middleware application called PMS on mainframe and how to manipulate that data.

Best Experience: Building a app that lets you pull down any set of segment data from mainframe and figuring out a way to automatically annotate the data so you could just hover over it and you know what the data is exactly. This way I didn't have to constantly refer back to a reference manual to see what a field name is in a segment, or having to go talk to a mainframe developer to go look at their code. Btw, did I mention I made it searchable by field name??

TLDR: RTFM...

My dad (taught me how to code when I was a kid) was stuck serializing a Java enum/class to XML.... The enum wasn't just a list of string values but more like a Map(String,Object>.

He tried to annotate it with XMLEnum but the moment I saw this enum, I'm thinking that's unlikely to work.... Mapping all that to just a string?

He tried annotating the Fields in it using XMLAttribute but clearly wasnt working...

Also he use XMLEnumValue but from his test run I could clearly see it just replaced whatever the enum value would've been with some fixed String...

Me: Did you read the documentation or when the javadocs?

Dad: no, I don't like reading documentation and the samples didn't work.

I haven't done XML Serialization for years thought did use JSON and my first instinct was... You need a TypeAdapter to convert the enum to a serializable class.

So I do some Googling, read the docs then just played around with the code, figured out how to serialize a class and also how to implement XmlTypeAdapter.... 20 mins ...

Text him back with screenshots and basically:

See it's not that hard if you actually read up on the javadocs and realized ur enum is more like a class so probably the simple way won't work...

create large PR and annotate points of interest on the PR

still get told to walk through it for people as they won't be arsed to read it, or even look at the points of interests themselves

In Spring/Boot if you annotate a class as a Service is it started on a different thread? I used @PostConstruct to start listening to a connection.

The class with main () seems to just load Beans defined in the AppConfig?

I need it to start a thread that listens to a Mongo Changestream and trigger some action on each.

I noticed a log line under the watch() is never reached so seems it's blocking...