Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...

"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).

To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!

"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:

"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"

Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!

Some of my issues were:

- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.

What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.

His other achievements include:

- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.

- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.

- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.

But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.

... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.

Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.

Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Okay, story time.

Back during 2016, I decided to do a little experiment to test the viability of multithreading in a JavaScript server stack, and I'm not talking about the Node.js way of queuing I/O on background threads, or about WebWorkers that box and convert your arguments to JSON and back during a simple call across two JS contexts.

I'm talking about JavaScript code running concurrently on all cores. I'm talking about replacing the god-awful single-threaded event loop of ECMAScript – the biggest bottleneck in software history – with an honest-to-god, lock-free thread-pool scheduler that executes JS code in parallel, on all cores.

I'm talking about concurrent access to shared mutable state – a big, rightfully-hated mess when done badly – in JavaScript.

This rant is about the many mistakes I made at the time, specifically the biggest – but not the first – of which: publishing some preliminary results very early on.

Every time I showed my work to a JavaScript developer, I'd get negative feedback. Like, unjustified hatred and immediate denial, or outright rejection of the entire concept. Some were even adamantly trying to discourage me from this project.

So I posted a sarcastic question to the Software Engineering Stack Exchange, which was originally worded differently to reflect my frustration, but was later edited by mods to be more serious.

You can see the responses for yourself here: https://goo.gl/poHKpK

Most of the serious answers were along the lines of "multithreading is hard". The top voted response started with this statement: "1) Multithreading is extremely hard, and unfortunately the way you've presented this idea so far implies you're severely underestimating how hard it is."

While I'll admit that my presentation was initially lacking, I later made an entire page to explain the synchronisation mechanism in place, and you can read more about it here, if you're interested:

http://nexusjs.com/architecture/

But what really shocked me was that I had never understood the mindset that all the naysayers adopted until I read that response.

Because the bottom-line of that entire response is an argument: an argument against change.

The average JavaScript developer doesn't want a multithreaded server platform for JavaScript because it means a change of the status quo.

And this is exactly why I started this project. I wanted a highly performant JavaScript platform for servers that's more suitable for real-time applications like transcoding, video streaming, and machine learning.

Nexus does not and will not hold your hand. It will not repeat Node's mistakes and give you nice ways to shoot yourself in the foot later, like `process.on('uncaughtException', ...)` for a catch-all global error handling solution.

No, an uncaught exception will be dealt with like any other self-respecting language: by not ignoring the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. If you write bad code, your program will crash, and you can't rectify a bug in your code by ignoring its presence entirely and using duct tape to scrape something together.

Back on the topic of multithreading, though. Multithreading is known to be hard, that's true. But how do you deal with a difficult solution? You simplify it and break it down, not just disregard it completely; because multithreading has its great advantages, too.

Like, how about we talk performance?

How about distributed algorithms that don't waste 40% of their computing power on agent communication and pointless overhead (like the serialisation/deserialisation of messages across the execution boundary for every single call)?

How about vertical scaling without forking the entire address space (and thus multiplying your application's memory consumption by the number of cores you wish to use)?

How about utilising logical CPUs to the fullest extent, and allowing them to execute JavaScript? Something that isn't even possible with the current model implemented by Node?

Some will say that the performance gains aren't worth the risk. That the possibility of race conditions and deadlocks aren't worth it.

That's the point of cooperative multithreading. It is a way to smartly work around these issues.

If you use promises, they will execute in parallel, to the best of the scheduler's abilities, and if you chain them then they will run consecutively as planned according to their dependency graph.

If your code doesn't access global variables or shared closure variables, or your promises only deal with their provided inputs without side-effects, then no contention will *ever* occur.

If you only read and never modify globals, no contention will ever occur.

Are you seeing the same trend I'm seeing?

Good JavaScript programming practices miraculously coincide with the best practices of thread-safety.

When someone says we shouldn't use multithreading because it's hard, do you know what I like to say to that?

"To multithread, you need a pair."