Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.

I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.

But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.

Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."

His response was:

"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.

You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."

So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.

Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.

Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍

Not just Stack Overflow, but all help forums:

If someone asks a question, and you think you might know the answer based on its subject or context, please spare a thought for others and instead of dragging the post on for pages and pages without an answer in order to show the poster up for being inadequately articulate, please make the first post a link to at least seemingly relevant reference material.

Nothing more frustrating looking for some undocumented api syntax, finding a similar question that you might be able to gleam from, and then only seeing pages of "aaah, but what OS are you on? What colour is your desktop? What is the average velocity of a..."

You can see they are struggling with an api, and you clearly know where to find the answer, so just quit the cocksure jostling of pretending you're any good at support and just be useful. The poster may be a tool, but the thousands of hits from Google will just think you're a twat.

Why do we post here? Is this just an outlet for our intrusive thoughts? A therapy session for things we can't articulate in meetings? Being able to say controversial things we are not allowed to say other places?

It feels like this place exists outside of time and reality. It really is refreshing, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes really offensive. Things that exist here that would not be tolerated elsewhere:

1. alternate ideas of software, sometimes politics, theories of existence, people liking javascript
2. ostream (I love you man)
3. bullying
4. saying what you really feel
5. telling people to fuck off

What would we do without this place?

Meanwhile my intrusive thoughts:

Why do big companies hire such loser engineers ??? I mean what the hell man. When you are hiring a fresher to code they should at least know how to apply/write a for loop. I once had a colleague who assigned each array element individually instead of writing a for loop and asked me why I refused to approve his stupid code. What do I reply to this ? It was so dumb, I could not articulate an answer.

Around 6 years ago I started at this company. I was really excited, I read all their docs then I started coding. At every code review, I noticed something was a little off. I seemed to get lots of weird nitpicking about code styling. It was strange, I was using a linter, I read their rules but basically every review was filled with random comments. About 3 months in I noticed, "oh! there aren't actually any rules, people are debating them in my code reviews!" A few more reviews went by and then I commented, "ya I'm not doing any of this, code review isn't a place to have philosophical debates." All hell broke loose! I got a few pissed off developers, and I said, listen I don't care what the rules are, you just need to clearly fucking articulate them and if you want to introduce one, I don't care about that either just don't do it in the middle of my review. I pissed off 1 dev real bad. Me and this dev were working together, the QA person on the team stood up and said "hey! you know what I love about your code reviews?!" The other dev and myself looked at each other kind of nervously, "I love that you're both right, these are all problems!"... 1 year later (and until now) me and the other dev are still friends. Leave it to QA to properly identify the bug.

Why is it that if you are not able to remember every single detail about something you've heard, that you as a person are deemed worthless?

Everything you do and need in life is bound to your memory.
Can't remember a name?
That's rude.
Can't remember what a technology does?
You won't get that job.
Can't remember the topics you learned about in school?
You won't get that education.

I can't remember things, my mind is constantly drifting. This, together with my inability to articulate myself clearly, makes me a complete nobody.
I hope that someday I'm just able to do something creative and not have these issues. Until then I'll just try not to jump in front of a train.

breakthrough moment

just realized, when reading english books; my brain makes a conversion to my native langauge.

and instead doing conversion, if I articulate the information in the english language itself, I seem to understand better.

The amount of highly sexual, disgusting jokes and shit that me and my employees say at the office behind close doors is the primary reason why I keep the door to my department offices closed.

I usually tell everyone that it is due to covid concerns, but it ain't, we really do be making the most disgusting jokes known to man.

Example:

Me: cum bucket!!!!
From outside the office, the CMS admin: "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm yess daddy??"

My office is not normal, my guys are polite, articulate and proper in any other meeting that we attend, but dear me I sometimes worry.

Playing articulate! with family and the word was zero. My description was "What is the first number?".

They didn't get it right first time.

I invited a colleague to the repository and taught her some basic git so she could edit some texts without having to interrupt my workflow.

All of a sudden, some parts stopped working. Guess i should have been a bit more articulate when telling her about commit messages..

THANK YOU DEVRANTS for supporting comment modifying!!

My crappy Samsung Galaxy routinely screws up words and punctuation, and I don't always remember to read it before sending. You've helped me seem articulate and non-idiotic.

Apologies if this has been asked here before, but I wanted an open feedback on a query: Is there such a thing as overdocumenting?

I take pride in being a very articulate developer, being as descriptive as possible in my emails, internal communications, PR review comments, JIRA etc.

A product guy from the company today mentioned: "Though I understand your good intent behind being as descriptive as possible, it is possible that some of the junior engineers might get overwhelmed/ intimidated looking at those comments/ emails and it might stop them reaching out to you with your doubts."

I was not able to wrap my head around this, because I don't understand how a descriptive explanation might overwhelm anyone. It's a skill I picked up going through my career and I personally have always respected peers who documented things properly.

Open to feedback. Thank you in advance.

Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.

I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.

Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.

Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.

Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.

And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.

Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.

Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.

I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.

And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.

I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.

So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years.

!dev

Well, it's time for a personal thing today, because I was hit with some shit today that I'm still kinda shook about.

So, as a bit of introduction (I've mentioned these in previous posts before but whatever, not everybody sees everything): I'm currently a senior in high school and I'm in the school's band (neither are too related, but a bit of setup for this story). I've been talking to a girl lately and I think I like her. She's fun to be around, kinda silly, and just great overall. She makes me happy and I like it. Her name is Grace, her sister's name is Taylor (just to avoid confusion later)

In the school's band, we play at home football and basketball games. Today was a basketball game. Normally when there's a game I just stay after school because I don't want to go home and come back a couple hours later, plus I like to hang out with some of the other people who do the same thing.

Grace was staying after for the game too. I was talking to her in the band room, kinda flirting a bit (on an unrelated side note, she's ticklish). Someone comes in the band room because he wanted to practice a bit, to get ready for the game. She's going back and forth between the band room and somewhere else (not too sure where she was). At one point I left to get a drink, come back, she's sitting next to him, just talking. I join the conversation, and her sister (Taylor) comes in, to get ready herself.

I go over to talk to Taylor for a minute. She looks at Grace and the other guy, then looks at me and just says "separate them". To which I said "...what? why? how?"

Me and her go outside the band room and she tells me that basically the guy has been cheating on his girlfriend with Grace, and it's just hurting everyone involved, except him basically. His girlfriend doesn't seem to fucking care, and he's done it before with someone else. (The other person actually like vaguely mentioned it to me a long time ago, but I didn't really know what she was talking about until now)

So basically, dude's cheating on his girlfriend with Grace. And I like Grace. Honestly don't know what the fuck to do. I want to do something because whenever something's going on with Grace, her sister always trusts me to make sure shit goes right. Some times when Grace wouldn't eat, her sister would always talk to me and ask me to make sure she actually eats.

Fuck guys. This stuff has been on my mind for the past ~4 hours and I don't know what to do, or if I even can do anything about it. I just needed to get this shit off my chest.

Sorry for the long personal story. Some parts I didn't really articulate very well. Honestly it was more of me just getting everything into words.

Since the 3rd day, I have been telling y'all but none of you listened to me.

I kept repeating that I am the dumbest person I know. Why didn't you believe me when I said it?

Remember, Booking feedback? They sent me another official rejection with additional feedback. Mind blown.

That feedback really helped me understand what was going wrong. And now today in an interview, I was asked a question and the interviewer said, "I am looking for a specific details like xyz for why you should be a Sr PM".

That's when it clicked me, that I have done stuff and I know things. It's just that I didn't understand the question and wasn't able to articulate and communicate well.

My dumbass just needs constant feedback to learn. How much I love feedback more than ever.

The feedback cycle is interesting too. When I was new, I hated it. Then started to realise the value of it.

Then it did felt bad in the very instance whenever I got one, but quickly I used to incorporate the changes.

And now, I am crave and desperately seek feedback. It only helps me improve.

Funnily, everyone gave inputs when I didn't want it. And now when I am hunting for it, no one is giving inputs. This is how life is.

Nonetheless, I am pretty impressed with Booking. Good people, nice vibes, and kickass culture for sure.

Whenever we have to do Sprint Retros i feel like i am trapped in self-help group.
Recently, we had to describe our work/team like we would do amazon reviews. That is, we had to write "reviews" about our last sprint.

I sincerely would like to know why we can't discuss problems like grown adults, if there are any. Why do we have to pretend we are in a space rocket, on a sailing boat, in a formula one race car or reviewing amazon articles to articulate our needs?
I feel like developers are treated like stupid, little kids, and the majority of the developers don't have a problem with it.

Historian who fucks up history stories every time I try to talk about them.

I love history, but I'll be damned if I can actually remember the details correctly​or articulate them

"Find the simple story in the product, and present it in an articulate and intelligent, persuasive way." - Bill Bernbach

When you do some group programming and let yourself get led wasting an entire day into writing 6 out of ~12 tedious higher level unit tests with lots of data setup and jerry rigging, that turn out to not even test the code changes you made on a ticket that another team is depending on.

But thank you to your tech lead for helping rope you out of that stupid shit with knowledge and clout.

Unfortunately the ticket has your name on it and everybody except the goon squad probably thinks you're a retard for going down that adventure (which was not your idea or desire).

I need to learn how to articulate no this isn't worth it, the complicated monolith software architecture with many different moving parts, among many other things.

Area of focus...leaving a couple tests running while I go enjoy a coffee on the balcony and focus on making the payloads more serious/articulate/real .