LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

So I tried to start learning Spring 5

How the fuck do you guys do it? Holy shit.

30 seconds in:

"Spring really isn't hard, you start with this request handler interacting with a view parser..."

Alright, sounds good

2 minutes in:

"So in order to use SpringResponseDriverActionHandlerServiceRequesterService you'll need to import com.org.java.spring.util.driver.comagain.request.response.request.drivers and include this 37 level deep nested XML property and finally extend this abstract class and implement it over an iterable list with this specific annotation aaaaaaand.... Done"

> Hello, world!

"See, spring is easy!"

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

Developers created IDEs with intelligent code completion and languages provide users with an annotation syntax to document their methods.

And then there is Python, nuking all the efforts of our ancestors by dynamic typing. And they are smug enough to call this laziness duck typing. "If it squawks like a duck, swims like a duck, walks like a duck its a duck".
Shit no, it ain't a duck because a fucking goose does all the same but is a mean bastard compared to a duck. You might pet a duck but only the craziest will attempt to pet a goose.

Fuck python and undocumented methods in particular!

The fucker complains when someone doesn't write unit tests, meanwhile he tops any new code he writes with a @codeCoverageIgnore annotation ... 😒😒

Pissed off. Planning on imposing a company wide hook that prevents you checking in code with a @Generated annotation. Seriously, never even heard about it being used outside of auto generated code until some bozos here seem to have started using it to silently drop complicated classes from test coverage metrics. Is this a thing with new coders these days, or are my lot just cowboys?!

No more, anyway. Sometimes it's convenient to be able to pull rank.

Slowly getting better with RegEx problems! Warning, lots of non-computer linguistic geekiness ahead.

Been working on some functions recently to replicate the furigana (Chinese character annotation) functions available over at JP.SE in PHP for a project.

Managed to get the basic cases down fairly quick:

[Chinese character][reading] => <ruby><rb>Chinese Character</rb><rt>Reading</rt></ruby>

However I realized this evening that there are patterns where this repeats twice for one word, such as the following:

[Chinese Character][helper Japanese character(s)][Chinese Character][possibly optional word ending][reading for the whole thing]

Managed to get it working for both cases initially, but then I found out that adding a Japanese character to either of my test strings (see graphic) would cause the annotations to fall grossly out of sync. The next two hours disappeared pretty fast before discovering that the issue was that I was removing the wrong string length from the annotation string, and just happened to luck out with a test case where it worked the first time.

Probably going to do a code review of it with the intern next time he's in. One of the things I've been stressing to him lately is that however easy a task may be for a human, there are all kinds of extra things that need to be tracked in order for a computer to be able to follow your logic.

TL;DR; do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

They say verbalising it makes it less painful. So I guess I'll try to do just that. Because it still hurts, even though it happened many years ago.

I was about to finish college. As usual, the last year we have to prepare a project and demonstrate it at the end of the year. I worked. I worked hard. Many sleepless nights, many nerves burned. I was making an android app - StudentBuddy. It was supposed to alleviate students' organizational problems: finding the right building (city plans, maps, bus schedules and options/suggestions), the right auditorium (I used pictures of building evac plans with classes indexed on them; drawing the red line as the path to go to find the right room), having the schedule in-app, notifications, push-notifications (e.g. teacher posts "will be 15 minutes late" or "15:30 moved to aud. 326"), homework, etc. Looots of info, loooots of features. Definitely lots of time spent and heaps of new info learned along the way.

The architecture was simple. It was a server-side REST webapp and an Android app as a client. Plenty of entities, as the system had to cover a broad spectrum of features. Consequently, I had to spin up a large number of webmethods, implement them, write clients for them and keep them in-sync. Eventually, I decided to build an annotation processor that generates webmethods and clients automatically - I just had to write a template and define what I want generated. That worked PERFECTLY.

In the end, I spun up and implemented hundreds of webmethods. Most of them were used in the Android app (client) - to access and upsert entities, transition states, etc. Some of them I left as TBD for the future - for when the app gets the ADMIN module created. I still used those webmethods to populate the DB.

The day came when I had to demonstrate my creation. As always, there was a commission: some high-level folks from the college, some guests from businesses.

My turn to speak. Everything went great, as reversed. I present the problem, demonstrate the app, demonstrate the notifications, plans, etc. Then I describe at high level what the implementation is like and future development plans. They ask me questions - I answer them all.

I was sure I was going to get a 10 - the highest score. This was by far the most advanced project of all presented that day!

Other people do their demos. I wait to the end patiently to hear the results. Commission leaves the room. 10 minutes later someone comes in and calls my name. She walks me to the room where the judgement is made. Uh-oh, what could've possibly gone wrong...?

The leader is reading through my project's docs and I don't like the look on his face. He opens the last 7 pages where all the webmethods are listed, points them to me and asks:
LEAD: What is this??? Are all of these implemented? Are they all being used in the app?
ME: Yes, I have implemented all of them. Most of them are used in the app, others are there for future development - for when the ADMIN module is created
LEAD: But why are there so many of them? You can't possibly need them all!
ME: The scope of the application is huge. There are lots of entities, and more than half of the methods are but extended CRUD calls
LEAD: But there are so many of them! And you say you are not using them in your app
ME: Yes, I was using them manually to perform admin tasks, like creating all the entities with all the relations in order to populate the DB (FTR: it was perfectly OK to not have the app completed 100%. We were encouraged to build an MVP and have plans for future development)
LEAD: <shakes his head in disapproval>
LEAD: Okay, That will be all. you can return to the auditorium

In the end, I was not given the highest score, while some other, less advanced projects, were. I was so upset and confused I could not force myself to ask WHY.

I still carry this sore with me and it still hurts to remember. Also, I have learned a painful life lesson: do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

My last post was a year ago. What brought me back here is the ability of AI to agree and apologize to anything and everything, while producing the worst hopeful code.

4 days I wasted, trying to make an android audio visualizer, but AI... sigh.
It gave me the wrong structure of FFT bytes emitted. I corrected it
It gave me the wrong logarithm calc, I corrected it
It gave me the wrong sampling rate, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong texture order, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong glsl sample2d, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong textureID generation, I corrected it.
It gave me a render which was about 10 fps, I found out that instead of using native onDraw, I had a fcking delta time in my shader. I almost corrected it, I gave up

Lets go to code generators with Annotations.
Like always, starts very positive, until I start to correct it.
It gave me the wrong file locations, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong order of find copy modify and write to .build, I didnt correct it.
It gave me regexes to find annotations. Im like So whats the use of an "ANNOTATION PROCESSOR"
It apologizes and used a fucking regex in the processor,..... I didnt correct it, in the end, I was left with a separate module, targetting iOS Android and JVM, with an annotation processor implemented in jvmMain, which tries to modify commonMain src by finding annotations with regexes, which wont run on app build or app sync project, but only on java -jre command pointing to that fucking .java class in that module, which takes at least 2 mins to run, and Finally generate 0 files.

I needed to rant, I understand LLMs are just models of words built and stolen from the most intelligent and dumbest people out there. But Im an idiot for getting my hopes high. I cant build anything new and unheard of. I used to do that. I once made a textView + image print util for a bluetooth printer just to say FU to libraries and heavy sdks. like literally rasterizing shit to bluetooth packets. I needed to let off some steam. I havent been here in a year so I dont know what reactions I can get from this rant. I bet someone will just say yeah we tired of 'Fuck AI' rants. but shit, it hurts. When I gave up on that visualizer, I downloaded an app, I think its called project M, like in reference to MilkDrop.. like the Winamp Milkdrop. I opened it, played something on spotify, and let my eyes go blind

Today I've implemented two custom annotation and two validators for those annotations (Java). It's a huge nested object so it's not as easy as I thought to begin with. That pretty much the only thing I've been doing today, and I feel like I've added absolutely no value to the company and feels a bit ashamed not to have done it faster when I look back at how simple it actually was. Makes me wanna choke myself...

every time I run into some issue in rust and spend days googling and asking a billion AI chat bots turns out it was rust that was wrong

I'm so exhausted

do they have brain worms

nobody considers "hey maybe this feature isn't in yet" (and actually they'll argue against it being a feature and you should feel bad at coming up with it)

they're just like "you're doing it wrong!"

YOU HAVE ALL THE INFORMATION TO INFER THE TYPE AND YOU DID INFER THE TYPE YET YOU TELL ME I NEED TO ANNOTATE THE TYPE BUT YOU'VE INFERRED IT AND YOU CANT TELL ME WHY I NEED TO ANNOTATE IT

And I love how suddenly you can convert a Result object using `as` which is a keyword reserved only for primitives, so say the docs... and it works (and works at runtime as well). because the type was never wrong. you fucking inferred it. but you're bitching at me that you need an annotation. when you don't.

remember when languages were made by people that actually liked coding instead of this clout-chasing nonsense. that's what I'm blaming this on

Hmmm, so you’ve used the DAO pattern everywhere so you’re not coupled to a particular database, but you don’t mind having 8 lines of Hibernate annotations at the start of an entity class, and 2-3 annotations on every property.
I see...

Was so angry... Was all the day wondering why my rest method wasnt outputting a certain property (in null to be more precise)... When almost 5 hours has passed, I realized it was due the @JsonIgnore annotation... soooo angryyyyy jaja

TGIF... And once again solved another issue brought up by another dev by just reading the javadocs on the problematic Spring annotation

How senior do you need to be to finally learn the first step to solving most problems is to RTFM....

"You don't need to put a type annotation here, the type will be inferred by the compiler"

"We don't need to mark this function as async, since we are already returning a promise but not awaiting it yet within this method"

TypeScript codebase. Am I wrong to prefer that things be explicit rather than implicit? Sounds a bit tryhard to try and make things implicit, but maybe the async really changes behavior in the second case? I don't think so, and I prefer to mark an asynchronous operation as such, but I'm still doubtful; that's why I humbly ask you all what makes more sense here.

I just hate the 'inline injection annotation' way of doing stuff in Angular. Why? Why would you want to make the reader's life so tough? Coz minification? Well, fuck minification! Maybe I'm ranting coz I just started learning, ok, whatever!

Hello folks.

This is my first rant ever here, although it may not be a 'standard' one. Am I the only poor soul who finds Java Enterprise annotations (the fucking @DoSomething) the zenit of antiesthetic and unreadable code?

I fear I may be alone in this battle.

Thinking about a new annotation:
@JavaCondom

on function: it puts "... throws Exception " at the end
on class: reflection puts "... throws Exception" on every goddamn function

It could have global app property which makes appends every exception with a reassuring message like: "There is so much java code out there already, that this shit will never ever end"

In my graduation project, I used the Spring framework. I dreamt that everyone has an annotation on top of his head, and when anyone tried to talk with me, I wasn't able to understand him, so I started to scream : "Change the annotation !"

Imglab - an online image annotation application for machine learning

I had long time to figure out how to send an email via java over wildfly with @Resource annotation and finally found how to do it, according StackOverFlow, i just had to create new instance with @EJB Annotation instead create it with "new" *face palm*

I am new to redis and confused how this works

To keep it simple lets say i have a CRUD service for user

- POST user, just creates user

- GET user by id, fetches user but using annotation @CacheEvict(). This method has a Thread.sleep(3000) before fetching user

- GET all users, fetches all users but using annotation @Cacheable()

- PUT user by id, updates a single with annotation @CacheEvict(). This method has a Thread.sleep(3000) before fetching user

- DELETE user by id, deletes a single user with annotation @CacheEvict()

---

GOOD:

When i GET user by id, i wait 3 seconds and then get the fetched user

When i GET user by id again, i get the fetched user instantly in 5 ms. This means it has pulled the user from REDIS cache instead of postgres

---

PROBLEM:

If i PUT user by id, update some data, and then if i GET user by id, it will return the user in 5 ms BUT the outdated user! Not the newly updated one. Because the Redis cache configuration has not expired yet. So there are now data inconsistencies

---

QUESTION:

How can i know When was something updated, deleted or whatever, so that i can fetch data from postgres (latest data) instead of Redis cache (outdated data)?

TIL vanilla Java has the facilities to do (some form) of arbitrary compile time metaprogramming via annotation processors

Anyone knows any annotation repo, like Hypothesis.io

Migrate batch from hibernate3 to hibernate5 and have to add @Transactionnal annotation.
Ok

public InsertBaseDao getInsertBaseDao(){...}

public InsertBaseDao setInsertDao() {...}

Seriously ?! An object called InsertBaseDao ? ...

To all the php haters: Try Symfony with Doctrine and Twig.

Doesn't fix the language but makes your life a lot easier (and it even adds Annotation support to php)

There is a new Java library very useful for building frameworks and in this library there is a particular classpath scan engine that deserves attention as it is original and powerful.
The peculiarity of this engine is the possibility to search classes over a path or the runtime classpath by concatenable and nestable criteria by exploiting the power of the lambda expressions on the native Java reflection elements such Class, Field, Method, Constructor, Module, Package, Annotation, etc ... thus giving the possibility therefore to carry out searches without limits and for any criterion that can be immaginated: this library is called Burningwave Core, it is open source and on the official wiki on github there are a lot of examples.