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Search - "bad development"
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Me Visiting a new location...
*Device found a new wi-fi signal:
worldsMostSecureRouter
*Enter password:
worldsMostSecureRouter123
*Authorizing...
*Obtaining IP address
*Connected2 -
I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.
In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.
My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.
We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.
Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.
One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).
Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.
He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.
I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja.
I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.
Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.
Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.
For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.
I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(
I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.
I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back.
I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.
After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together.
I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.
I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.
I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.
But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.
I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.
Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?32 -
I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.
Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...
Fuck me if some students are horrendous!
To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.
One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.
The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).
But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".
He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.
The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.
This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.
About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".
The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.
Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"
I'm done.
"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"
"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"
"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."
The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."23 -
This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.
TL;DR Network upgrade
Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.
At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.
The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.
Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.
One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)
One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.
The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.
The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.
The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.
The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)
The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)
What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.
The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...10 -
This rant is devoted to my study friends. You see, I never knew what it was to not have people making fun of you/bullying you until I started my study.
Elementary school + highschool was one big mess of bullying, being made fun of and hardly having any friends.
At highschool I decided I wanted to go into IT. Especially programming. Programming in particular because when I was programming, I, for once, was the one in control. The code listened to me and for that tiny moment I was god.
Never really had much friends though and when I told my parents I wanted to do an MBO study (application development), my mother warned me that although she and my dad supported me with whatever my decision would be, MBO level studies were rough because of the general mindset/atmosphere there.
I thought fuck it, I want to do programming because that seems awesome and maybe I'll even make some friends with the same interests!
Then study arrived. Met a few guys with similar interests and we started hanging out together.
And then it came back just like before. Two guys who loved bullying and I was still a quite easy target because I couldn't stand up for myself.
But, then something happened. I liked a girl, she was in the hallway and two of the bullies (there were about 4-5 in total) got up and started fucking around with me (about her) and I just sat there, not daring to do anything with tears in my eyes.
Then two of my classmates noticed it, quickly came to my desk and started pushing the guys away with 'back the fuck off, what the fuck has he done to you?!'. Then one of those guys (now still about my best friend) came to me to see if I was alright.
We started talking. Then at some point, another bully had a go at me. This would be the final time. He was about 2 meters tall (I was about 160cm or something) and stood there in the door opening with a very nasty smile saying all nasty stuff, trying to intimidate me and probably tried to make me feel like crap again.
Nice guy on my right asked me to step to the left. Gave that guy a huge fucking foot in his chest and he smacked onto the ground. Made a gentleman's sign like 'go ahead, sir!' while gesturing towards the door.
From that moment on the bullying stopped. Throughout my study, some other bad things happened but those guys were always there for me.
Although I've lost touch with most of the guys (they're on social media, I'm not really), we still meet up once in a while and have a lot of beers while talking and laughing and thinking back to the good times we had together.
The study wasn't the best for what we were taught as in studying but it's the best choice I've ever made nonetheless.
Oh and that best friend and I still have loads of contact!13 -
!rant
Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.
11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.
You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.
That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.
Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.
Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.
There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.
In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.
Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.
And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.
I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.
Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !
Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life9 -
Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)
Long story:
*I add first unit tests to project.
*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.
*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.
Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"
Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".
Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."
Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"
Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"
Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"
Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"
Me: "then why add any tests?"
Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"
*Boss storms out
I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.
That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.
My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.
We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.
I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.
Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.21 -
[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]
Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.
That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.
If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!6 -
!rant
!!git
Who here uses `master` for development?
My boss (api guy) tried to convince me that was normal practice. I gently told him that it sounded crazy and very very bad.
Here's the dev path I'm enforcing on my repos:
(feature branches) -> dev -> qa* -> master -> production*
*: the build server auto-pulls from these branches, and pushes any passing builds to staging/production.
Everyone works on their own feature branches, and when they're happy with their work, they merge it into `dev`. `dev`, therefore, is for feature integration testing. After everything is working well on `dev`, it gets merged into `qa` for the testers to fawn over and beat with sticks. Anything that passes QA gets merged into `master`, where it sits until we're ready to release it. When that time comes (it's usually right away, but not always), `master` gets merged into `production`.
This way, `master` is always stable and contains the newest code, so it's perfect for forking/etc. Is this standard practice, or should I be doing something different?
Also, api guy encourages something he calls "running a racetrack" -- each dev has their own branch (their initials) and they push to that throughout the day. everyone else pulls from it regularly and pushes to their own branch. When anyone's happy with their code, they push from their (updated) branch to `qa` (I insisted on `dev` instead.)
Supposedly this drastically reduces the number of merge conflicts when pushing to an upstream branch due to having a more recent ancestor node?
I don't quite follow that, but it seems to me that merging/pushing throughout the day would just make them happen sooner? idk.
What are your thoughts?30 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.
Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".
Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?
Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?
Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.
Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?
I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.
But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.44 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:
1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!
2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.
3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤
5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!
6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.
7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.
8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.
9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.
If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.
To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!
End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!
#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative16 -
5 Types Of Programmers
1.The duct tape programmer
The code may not be pretty, but damnit, it works!
This guy is the foundation of your company. When something goes wrong he will fix it fast and in a way that won’t break again. Of course he doesn’t care about how it looks, ease of use, or any of those other trivial concerns, but he will make it happen, without a bunch of talk or time-wasting nonsense. The best way to use this person is to point at a problem and walk away.
2.The OCD perfectionist programmer
You want to do what to my code?
This guy doesn’t care about your deadlines or budgets, those are insignificant when compared to the art form that is programming. When you do finally receive the finished product you will have no option but submit to the stunning glory and radiant beauty of perfectly formatted, no, perfectly beautiful code, that is so efficient that anything you would want to do to it would do nothing but defame a masterpiece. He is the only one qualified to work on his code.
3.The anti-programming programmer
I’m a programmer, damnit. I don’t write code.
His world has one simple truth; writing code is bad. If you have to write something then you’re doing it wrong. Someone else has already done the work so just use their code. He will tell you how much faster this development practice is, even though he takes as long or longer than the other programmers. But when you get the project it will only be 20 lines of actual code and will be very easy to read. It may not be very fast, efficient, or forward-compatible, but it will be done with the least effort required.
4.The half-assed programmer
What do you want? It works doesn’t it?
The guy who couldn’t care less about quality, that’s someone elses job. He accomplishes the tasks that he’s asked to do, quickly. You may not like his work, the other programmers hate it, but management and the clients love it. As much pain as he will cause you in the future, he is single-handedly keeping your deadlines so you can’t scoff at it (no matter how much you want to).
5.The theoretical programmer
Well, that’s a possibility, but in practice this might be a better alternative.
This guy is more interested the options than what should be done. He will spend 80% of his time staring blankly at his computer thinking up ways to accomplish a task, 15% of his time complaining about unreasonable deadlines, 4% of his time refining the options, and 1% of his time writing code. When you receive the final work it will always be accompanied by the phrase “if I had more time I could have done this the right way”.
What type of programmer are you?
Source: www.stevebenner.com16 -
This is what I found in the logs:
3280546 I had a cup of tea and now it's fixed
9daaf6c copy and paste is not a design pattern
958ca5b It compiles! Ship it!
a9edf8d LAST time, Masahiro, /dev/urandom IS NOT a variable name generator...
438072f 640K ought to be enough for anybody
1fb839b Too lazy to write descriptive message
4d70890 ...
d6ce0c8 Ugh. Bad rebase.
a00b544 Programming the flux capacitor
49715cb Fix my stupidness
4babf07 Do things better, faster, stronger
49b3a7b SEXY RUSSIAN CODES WAITING FOR YOU TO CALL
12c7b55 formatted all
2658c87 and so the crazy refactoring process sees the sunlight after some months in the dark!
2376c89 - Temporary commit.
a83220a I honestly wish I could remember what was going on here...
3347007 work in progress
3382b4c well crap.
109748a Glue. Match sticks. Paper. Build script!
c3f025e Useful text
70394e7 Who knows WTF?!
0d78f14 breathe, =, breathe
5344e39 removed tests since i can't make them green
8a3a6bf better grepping
2777cc4 first blush
cf620ff Continued development...
9591c19 Too lazy to write descriptive message
767e0cd Some shit.
763602a Yes, I was being sarcastic.
8d7a602 /sigh
c6296e5 rats4 -
I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.
Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.
Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.
Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!
I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.
My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.
Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.
Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.
Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.
Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.
"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?
But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?rant pages seriously load in 10+ seconds slower than wordpress too do i want insurance this badly? 10 trackers 4 ad networks elbonian devs website probably cost $1million or more too root gets insurance stop reading my tags and read the rant more bugs than you can shake a stick at the 54 steps to insanity more bugs than master of orion 313 -
Story time. My first story ever on devRant.
To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)
My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!
My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!
I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!
At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!
Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.
Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...
Thanks for reading ...13 -
Weekend weekend weekend. Yay!
After hard week at uni, took a day off and I am in bed since morning 😁
So I decided to find some kind of "dev social app" and got this. Not bad at all!
I am also fairly new at web development, using Python - at the moment Flask, later on Django so I am looking forward to meet some Flask/Django users here :)
And I just wanna add some wisdom here:)7 -
When I'm watching a news story about the tech industry or software development, I always wonder if people in other professions also scream at their TV when their field of expertise is butchered with bad analogies and half-truths by reporters and anchors.11
-
Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.
Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)
Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.
So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.
And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.
Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...
People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.
Summary
PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.
That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.
Enjoy.8 -
People giving Xcode bad reviews for being english only.
Stay the fuck away from development if english is a problem for you! 🤬
I'm already annoyed by the translation craze everywhere in development.
At least Apple remains sane in that regard.14 -
So I'm on stack overflow trying to give back to the community that has helped me so much yanno.
So I see a question and decide to answer it but I'm on my mobile and trying to write a well formatted etc. answer is a bit tricky so instead I thought I would answer it as best I could on the phone so at least the OP would be going in the right direction and then when I got back to my computer, I would expand on the answer.
But before I had a chance (within 10 minutes of answering) some 200k+ rep dickhead decided it was his job to tell me how bad I was for not giving a proper answer and i have enough rep to comment and I should know better.
So I responded to him (my first mistake) and told him that my answer was intended to get him going and most likely he wouldn't need any more help but that I was going to update it when I got back to my computer.
Well he didn't like that and continued to berate me for my unbelievable behavior.
I then said that if he was that upset, then report me, or even better how about he actually answer the question instead of being a fuckwit to others that have tried.
I also said that I thought that SO and development in general was not about being given the answer but by finding it yourself and actually learning something and that sometimes you need to be pushed it the right direction to find the answer which is what I did here.
Well he disagreed with that too and downvoted my answer which by that point had been updated (like I said I would).
I just don't get it, what is wrong with these people and why has SO become such a toxic place?
I want to give back to the community and help others like people have done for me over the years, but then fuckheads like this just ruin it and make you not want to be a part of it anymore.
Then I come here to devRant and everyone is so nice to each other, you can see the respect.10 -
Interviewer : So what frameworks and library you usually use?
Me : i use volley for networking, gson for parsing, livedata/architecture components for architecture and observability , room for database and java for app development
I : ok so make this sample app using retrofit for networking, moshi for parsing, mvrx for architecture , rx for observability , sqldelight for db, dagger2 and kotlin for app dev. You have 8 hours
Me :(wtf?) But i never used those libs or language!
I : we just want to check how easily you adapt to different surroundings.
Me : -_-
Honestly i don't know of it was a great experience or a bad one . I was stressed the whole time but was able to adapt to almost all of those libraries and frameworks.
At the end i got selected but decided not to go for those ppl. That was just a lucrative opening of a venus fly trap, they would have stressed the hell out of me11 -
Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..
Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:
Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?
Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..
Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.
Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..
Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.
Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.
Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..
Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***
WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?
Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...6 -
Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).
The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)
I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.
So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.
My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.
Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.
I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.
I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.
I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.
But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.
I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.
Fuck off and die.22 -
TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.
I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.
FF to today:
- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"
And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.11 -
Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.
Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.
Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.
If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.
Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn3 -
I'm done with f/e. I so fucking hate it .
I fucking hate implementing weird highly animated websites designed by gurus
I fucking hate making them accessible.
I hate working on weird code generated by my coworkers and jump on projects with 0 specs.
I fucking hate this whole bloatware called javascript.
I fucking hate morons who think they know it all.
I'm fucking disgusted by the job market with their whole job specs ( Oh you don't have 5 year experience in some fucking stupid library I don't give a flying fuck. Too bad, we can't hire you )
And most importantly I fucking hate the day I chose f/e development instead of smth else.
Now at 29 I'm fucking stuck with this shit with no energy and patience to learn something else or at least jump on b/e or anything that is not related to web dev or js.
Sorry for so many fuckings but I had a breakdown.
Love ya.25 -
I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.
This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.
He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)
This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.
His train of thought makes no sense to me:
"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"
Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"
Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"
Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.
Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!
Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?
Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?
Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.
Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development
Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.
Him: Well, maybe.
MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.
The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.
I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.10 -
Allright, I'm pissed.
Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.
Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *
-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.
> Shit, Regret
Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.
> Big shit
Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"
Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.
> Fuck
* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *
* Feels save *
Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *
> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)
> Nope
* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"
> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"
* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)
My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.
> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista
This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...
Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).
Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.
* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *
For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed
> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)
"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app
> FML
* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *
> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)
UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it
* fixes as much as possible *
* Takes quick look at backend *
Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());
C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.
Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe
I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!
Wish me luck for today!undefined web development jsp school assignment not my job fuck up android studio tldr; not getting paid enough for this shit gradle blame backend9 -
I found this on Quora and It's awesome.
Have I have fallen in love with Python because she is beautiful?
Answer
Vaibhav Mallya, Proud Parseltongue. Passionate about the language, fairly experienced (since ...
Written Nov 23, 2010 · Upvoted by Timothy Johnson, PhD student, Computer Science
There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?
But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.
She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.
But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.
You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.
After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".
The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.
https://quora.com/Have-I-have-falle...#4 -
WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.
The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.
Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.
My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.
And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.
And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.
And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.
And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.
I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.7 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
Why is there so much hate against QA in general??
I read tons of rants about how bad testers are... and as a dev who does a lot of QA work, IT SUCKS!
We (devs) have to accept that are work needs to be tested! Otherwise we want be successful with our products.
BUT the testers need to know the development business! They should be trained at the same level as the devs are.
BECAUSE if the mug on my desk is smarter than the tester it is not going to work!
If the tester has full access to all the technologies, environments and tools (and are capable of using it) he has the ability to HELP!
I THINK that testing should be more than just follow predefined steps and let a random tool generate a bugreport.
I am sure that some of you are lucky enough to work with highly skilled testers so please let them help18 -
It's nice wanting to follow the best practice but many Java programmer have the bad habit to overdo it making lasagna code which causes painful headaches to who needs to maintain it afterwards. This is just a little sample of the "paranoia driven development" many does in my company.15
-
There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:
1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.
It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!
2. Not being asked about estimates.
Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).
3. Being the last part of the product development process.
Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.
This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?
I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.6 -
This is more of a wishful thinking scenario......but language/tech stack/whatever bashing.
Look, I get it, we like development, we would not be here if we didn't like it. But as my good friend @Stuxnet has mentioned in the past, making this a personality trait is fucking retarded, lame, small, and overall pathetic. I agree with this sentiment 100%
Because of this a lot of people have form some sort of elitist viewpoint concerning the technologies that people use, be it Java, C#, C++, Rust, PHP, JS, whatever, the same circle jerk of bashing on shit just seems completely fucking retarded. I am hoping for a new mentality being that most of us are younger, even if you are a 50+ year old developer, maturity should give you a different perspective, but alas, immaturity and a bitchy attitude carried throughout years of self dick sucking implications would render this null.
I could not give two fucks if the dude next to me is coding his shit in whatever as long as best practices are followed, proper documentation is enforced, results are being brought to our customers(which regardless of how much you try to convince us, none of your customers are fucking elite level) and happiness is ensured, then so fucking be it.
Gripes bitches and complaints are understandable, I dislike a couple of things about my favorite tools, and often wish certain features be involved in my particular tech stacks, does this make stuff bad? no, does it make me or anyone else less of a developer,? no so why give a fuck? bitch when shit bites you in the ass when someone does not know what the fuck they are doing with a language that permits writing bullshit. Which to be honest ALL of them fucking allow. Not one is saved from this. But NOT knowing how to work a solution, or NOT understanding a tech stack does not give you AUTOMATIC FULL insight on how x technology operates, thinking as such is so fucking arrogant and annoying.
But I am getting tired of looking at posts from Timmy, a 18 year old "dev" from whothefuckcares bitch about shit when they have never even made a fucking penny out of their "development" endeavors just because they read some dickhead's opinion on the internet regarding x tech stack and believes that adopting their bullshit troll ass virgin ideas makes them l337.
Get your own fucking opinion on things, be aggressive and stand fucking straight, maybe get some fucking pussy(or dick, whatever) and for fucks's sake learn to interact with other fucking human beings, take a fucking run, play games, break out from your whinny bitch ass shell, talk to that person that intimidates you, take a run, do yoga, martial arts anything that would break you out from being such a small little bitch.
Just fucking do something that keeps you from shitting on people 24/7 365/ a year.
We used to bitch about incompetent managers, shit bosses, fucking ludicrous assignments. Retarded shit that some other dev did, etc, etc. Seems like every other fucking retard getting into this community starts with stupid ass JS/PHP/Python/Java/C#/ whatever jokes and you idiots keep upvoting that shit. Makes those n00bs gain credability. Fuck me shit is so pathetic.
basically, make dev rant great again.
No fuck off and have a beer, or tea or whatever y'all drink.13 -
Just discovered this App, created my account to say Hello and create my first rant. I'm already in love!
To my Person:
I'm from Germany ( I hope my english is not too bad) and I'm 19 years Old and recently started my apprenticeship as a developer. I'm specialised at Web development, especially with PHP and JavaScript12 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.rant code application bad project management annoying as hell bad code c++ bad client bad design application development16 -
So finished a project for a client, the client signed a contract. He signed off that all milestones where reached. Text me that he was very pleased.
We give 30 days to pay. 8 days before the due date he asked for a meeting, telling us he wants to go another direction and he wants the source code to show the new development team he's going with to get a quote from them. I tell him that, that's fine he can have the source files once he pays for the product which was in the contract they signed mind you!! And this FUCKING DICK FART threats to sue, saying he's calling his lawyer, threatening me and my development partner with physical violence, and saying he's going to sue me personally not because me work was bad but because I refused to give him the product before he paid. I was calm we offered to meet his new dev team explain the code, and show them what they needed to see to give the clients a quote and they would not allow that, saying how now I'm not getting paid instead I'm getting sued and that he will publicly shame my startup company. Just complete bullshit, good thing I saved the original contract he wanted me to sign which had threats of physical violence I. His contract... Which in retrospect should have been a hint, but it was the highest paying contract we ever landed. Seems he never planned on paying. What's a guy to do?26 -
Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.
I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.
I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.
I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.
I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.
It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.
The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.
So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?19 -
JavaScript frameworks are bad
Each upvote on this post hinders development of bad JavaScript frameworks5 -
Never really used a UI framework for web development, always coded each component myself. Im using one now and I have to say it's not that bad!10
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LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR
* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *
30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*
*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *
"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."
My first reaction:
"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."
Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.
Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."
I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:
In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.
I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?
Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.
Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!
I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"1 -
i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.
but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.
even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...7 -
This new junior dev was going pretty well, learning pretty fast and working pretty fast from when I talked to them, but I wasn't seeing his changes up on GitHub.
Me: Hey have you finished *feature X*
Junior: Oh yeah a few days ago.
Me: Why aren't your changes up on GitHub?
Junior: Sorry, my bad, im not used to pushing stuff during the development since i was used to do all of my stuff on my own
(No kidding!)
Me: ok then push them
Junior: Emmm... I don't think I should... I kinda already started working on *feature Y* so it's full of bugs...
I don't wanna be mad at them they're pretty good at their stuff, and he's got some good comments on the performance of the program. But UUGGHH 😠
Rookie mistakes I guess14 -
doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();
Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).
Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.
Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.
So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.
Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.
I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!
Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.
Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.
doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();1 -
I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3
Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.
I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.
So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.
So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.
That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3
Microshaft WanBLowS.
I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.
Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.
At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.
So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.
Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.
That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.
(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)3 -
Folks...
I think I need to get away from web development...
Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.
I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!
Been there done that.
Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.
Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.
I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.10 -
I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.
This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.
First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.
I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.
A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.
So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.
At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.
Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...
So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.
Never a single word from the community about me.
Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).
I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.5 -
Me: Okay so here's the progress of your page so far.
Client: This doesn't mean sh1t to me show me the end result and I'll make adjustments then.
Me: oh my bad I didn't know you had a degree in web development the fack of me then. Like you know how to make adjustments...1 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.
1. COCKtail party thingy
Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋
(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)
2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla
So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!
Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.
So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.
That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!15 -
Recruiters call me and be like "I'm looking for a Python Developer to work in London with 5 Years of experience - Is that something you'd be interested in?"
I respond with - "Sure.. only if you can tell me where the f**k you found the word Python on my CV or ANYWHERE online."
1 - I've got ZERO experience in Python...
2 - I've got 3 Years experience in development regardless of being in anything Python related...
3 - I live 1-2 hours away from London...
Come on guys - Do you even read CVs before you blindly call? How shit are you!?
If I spent all my time calling candidates that had no relevance for the role I'm recruiting for (most likely to get call times up) back when I was a recruiter, my boss would have my nuts for lunch for making the agency look bad.5 -
How I met python
[long read but worth]
There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?
But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.
She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.
But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.
You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.
After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".
The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.10 -
Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.
But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!
So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...
For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.
For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!7 -
sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.
The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.
As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.
Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"
I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.
Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.
The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.
I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.
Made me feel dirty.12 -
Worst dev experience was when I was asked to "take a look at" a propriatery Windows app built by a now non-existent team at the company.
The code base resembled the quality of legacy code where about every hour I felt like I needed to vomit. But that wasn't even the worst part for me.
This was the first time I had to develop on Windows and was sent a separate dedicated laptop for this. Now I started to have a bad feeling about this because as far as I had known every single dev at the company used company Macs for development (including me for other projects). It turned out the Windows laptop was indeed configured for a non-dev team :)
Having liased with IT admins for a day I finally got my environment set up and hit install on the dependencies and in 10 minutes it got to less than 10%. The laptop was pretty powerful so I couldn't belive wtf was going on, fans were ramping. Checked task manager and the company Anti-Malware was hogging the whole CPU.
I was so mad that I managed to get the IT admins to completely disable it and then it was only the pain of working with shitty code on Windows which would have been more than enough from the start. Thankfully it only lasted a week. -
2018 dev goal #1: ✔️
This week I learned Python 3, as in most of the syntax. Not yet any development, but that will come tomorrow onwards.
Oh, and I hate the funky type system, which is almost non existent and so flexible that I don't know if it's just bad or I simply don't see why I should want it this way.
Please enlighten me why you think Python is great or just plain snake crap.
Did I mention snake case being common practice? And that Python doesn't know real private properties, methods, etc.? How does that work?17 -
Agreed to work on a mobile app project on Android. No contract signed, just was given what the client wanted from this sub-contractor.
No specific details given, had to figure out a lot of the minute details of how they wanted the application to behave. We would deliver a working part of the product before getting a % of the pay. We charged $30 /hr on a mobile app, low as heck.
It was me and another developer, neither of us had any contact with the clients to ask questions, all questions had to go through the sub-contractor. Many arguments and months later we find that what they're asking for only a phone manufacturer can do. Sub-contractor blames us for not doing our "research" when she/he was the only one able to contact the client to get requirements.
Sub-contractor wanted us to refund money. We declined but offered solutions.
Sub-contractor goes to client and manages to get approval of what we were able to do. Finally a light in this dark tunnel spanning 7 months.
On the day of releasing to the client the finished app, we get notification from Google that the app won't be published due to a recent policy change that came into effect in January. WTF.
Go back to sub-contractor, tell the bad news. Once again he/she says it's our fault for not doing the "research". Yeah as if we knew what Google is going to change. Asks for paid money back. We refuse.
We lastly suggested that we remove what Google wants removed on the app and release it that way.
We had billed 300 hours cumulative divided among 3 people (including the sub-contractor who didn't appear to do anything), and just 2 months of development. It's been 7 months and we were only paid for 240 hours, the rest was unpaid, and the sub-contractor still wants to make us give it back. /rant13 -
I've always been critical of python as a development language because of it's efficiency issues and the fact that it's essentially pseudocode. However, today I had to reflect 200 coordinated over the line x=355 for a course lab and I hella didn't feel like doing it in my normal languages. Wrote it using python in less than 2 minutes. It might be a bad language for efficiency, but it's one hell of a scripting language. Sorry, python. I never fully appreciated you until now.15
-
Was cleaning up some of the old files on my system and found the first ever raycast program I had written.. in c++
This was during a time im pretty sure all of you guys just like me learnt the things that you could possibly do using code.
The experience of the first time I ran this and saw the sprites appear was the awe all of us have experienced in our own ways.
The reason I found this picture interesting is many of us end up losing the wonder and sense of excitement that got us into development in first place.
Go back , clean up your drives .. find your old code. I'm sure there is no better feeling than looking at the past you , writing bad code , with a probably bad language on a bad editor with sleepless nights to get nothing more than the output we wanted.
It's amazing when you realise everything is better when it's simple. -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.
Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')7 -
Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.
Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.
For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.
I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"
Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"
And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.
the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.
Plus, you learn more when you teach others.16 -
My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.
I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.
About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.
My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.
Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.8 -
After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.
O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev
O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good
*An hour passes by*
O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*
TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.
Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer... -
i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.
i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.
another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.
anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.
i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...6 -
"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.
Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.
During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.
I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.
It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.
I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.
After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.
We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.
I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.
I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.
I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.
I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.
I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.
This is what burnout looks like.20 -
How Bad I'm at frontend Development: about 3 year ago i accidentally wrote </from> instead of </form> while working on the frontend of a website, everything just went bonkers. Took me 10+ hours to realize my mistake.
In my opinion frontend devs are real hero they have to learn multiple frameworks, and make website respinsive and work on IE at the same time. Idk Why the fuck clients still want their website to work on IE (fuck you Carl, your users are of age group 15-22 they don't even know wtf IE is)
P. S. At that time i didn't knew HTML validators are a thing.6 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
I have been working for my current employer about 3 years now. When I first got to work I was asked by another employee to work on an editor for certain types of files. We will call this employee Ed. Because his name is Ed.
Ed is a verifiable genius, and a genuinely great guy to work with. He is amazing with hardware and math. Ed has a need, or shall I say fetish. He wants an editor for some our proprietary files called "Settings files". They are just xml. Nothing special.
However, I have always had other priorities. We actually had a tense moment when I had to tell Ed my boss doesn't want me to work on the editor. I had started looking into working on the editor when my boss said stop working on this file. So since then it had become a running joke between Ed and myself. Well, I think it is funny, Ed smiles, but I know he wants this editor bad. Our boss even suggested at one time that Ed write this editor. He looked into it, but "other priorities" trumped this effort.
Okay, so now it has been 3 years and we still don't have this editor. Then I had an epiphany. Since Ed wants this editor I found an idea for the name of this program. "Settings Editor" is just too mundane. I now think it should be called: "Mr. Edit". I also found that the library we use for most of our development has text to speech built in. So when the program starts I can have it say: "Hello, I am Mr. Edit, the talking Settings Editor". I have never wanted to write this program so badly before. Muahahahahaha!5 -
Sat down with the Project Management team today to discuss a signage installation. This is how the conversation went...
Me: Right, so we need to get the hardware on-site asap so we can get this configured before it goes over to the production guys to have the facisa installed.
Them: That's fine we have plenty of time. Stop rushing things.
Me: Okay, so do we have the story board in place ready for development?
Them: Nope. Hasn't been done by the designer yet because he is in a bad mood.
Me: Okay so when does the client want this?
Them: 3 Weeks' time
Me: But it is atleast a week of dev time?
Them: Sure. But you can work late if needed...right?
This is a typical conversation between them and me. I'm the sole developer here. So done with today.12 -
At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.
Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.
Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.
After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.
Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.
My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V
Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.6 -
I asked the VMware crew at work when we were going to virtualize our network. This was about 5 years ago. I got basically laughed at for suggesting it. I asked when we were going to adopt Azure AD to ensure us being ready for moving to teams etc. Got insults back with how bad the cloud is.
Guess what two projects are getting finalized now? Glad I left that company. Going to enjoy some nice mellow weed, enjoy my 30 day x-mas vacay and jump fresh at a new position. New upstart with a security maker for the maritime sector. A company that embraces new tech by making it them selfs. New day with aiding in the development of an IoT based solution with cloud support.
Happy holidays peeps.2 -
I'm a game designer student in a Brazilian university. In my class I'm the only one who likes code and made the secure choice to be a future game programmer.
But recently some dudes on my class started to discourage me and telling me to give up that course and change to a computer science course.
I didn't feel that way... I think game programmers who know all the stuff and process of game development( modelling, concepts etc) are better professionals than the ones who just knows the scripting process. But sometimes their opinion flows up my head and I feel so unknown if I staying in the right way or not.
(Sry if my english still bad..hope you all understand anyway)17 -
On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.
When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.
So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.
Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..
Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"1 -
Everyone hates CSS
I'm a full-stack dev, I was considering CSS really hard to deal with for a long time. I have some friends who are bad at design and barely know how to use CSS and hate it.
Last year, I decided to learn CSS again after 6+ years of web development.
If you are a developer but hate CSS. maybe you should give it more time and learn it the right way.30 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
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.1 -
Liferay. Fucking Liferay.
I'm mostly C#, Java Dev with only a year of experience and as Kruger-Dunning effect says, I thought I'm not that bad. At the beginning of my job I've got tasked with creating an portlet for Liferay CMS which is written in Java. Can't be that bad, right? WRONG.
Liferay is real shit. Not only there is little to none community life but also documentation and tutorials are outdated! Many methods are doing the same functionality but are in different packages. JSP make coding a big fucking mess if you won't make shit ton of classes to clean it up. Also it has this incredible ability to crash whole portlet after a small change in classes structure.
I have to mention that no one could help me because company that I'm working for is a rather small one and there's no other Java developer beside me. This also means that it's hard to really get gut when no one is oversying my progress.
Also I really dislike web development. And Liferay made it even worse. I hope it will burn in hell.1 -
I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.
At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!
It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.
One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!
Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!
Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.
Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.
Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.
Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.
Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?
DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!
Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?
Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.
After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.
Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)3 -
Wow...lets a minute to appreciate the unsung hero's that revolted and went on to lead and win the battle against IE6.**shiver**
https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-c...
The majority of you will not understand or be able to appreciate the gravity and extent their actions had on improving quality of life for web developers globally... that is the true gift & legacy of their noble deeds.
and yes it was that bad... no, actually it was even worse - the best words i can use to describe (attempting) development in IE6 is that it felt like we were imprisoned in the software equivalent of a concentration camp where they had perfected the cruellest form of torture, where they allowed us to develop amazing next level experiences in modern browsers just so they could watch all hope drain from our faces as we were forced to destroy them, tearing out the magic in the name of IE6.10 -
I had this a while ago. Started a new project at my study (Application Development) and started working on the documentation. After rewriting parts of the documents for nine weeks (10 weeks for every project where I study) because they were not approved by my teacher because they didn't fit her 'personal preference/style', she even had the guts to tell me that I am a bad programmer because the application was even less than half complete. She only gave me one week to create the application that normally takes at least five weeks.5
-
It's been a crazy month. Python, redis, Linux. But this one should be a bit closer to home.
Telltale games, a US game development studio is winding up and let go all their staff without severance and were told they had 30 minutes to leave the premises.
Most of the devs were living paycheck to paycheck because of the high cost of living. Some were hired a week earlier and uprooted their families to work there.
That situation is bad enough. But what's worse is the sheer lack of empathy by the customers for the staff. They just want their product cone hell or high water. One even insisted that the devs should work for free until they deliver...
Pleasing the customer should never come at the expense of your staff. We still have a long way to go as an industry
https://youtu.be/QoEHVABcVkw6 -
Sorry, long since my last post...
I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.
For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.
A bit of Context
November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.
Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.
December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).
Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.
Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."
January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.
Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.
February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).
Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"
Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.
High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.
March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".
End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.10 -
This would be my first official post.
Been a IT Technician for a managed service provider for the past 9 years up until last year August. Managing director pulls me in with a movement to App Development after coming across some personal hobby projects I have done in the past.
Started in the new position in November as Junior Developer and workloads get dumped on me and left to figure it out. 4 weeks of running through code without documentation and the solutions started to make sense.
Started a new solution for a Large remote customer with documentation and timelines in December and I get pulled in again for a second time in front of the MD.
Good News:With effect in January I have been promoted to Head of Application development.
Bad News: The existing department head is leaving end of the month and I am to go 900km from home to hand over all responsibilities for the next 3 weeks.
Better News: Department has started shifting to DevOps and it is up to me to set the policies and work flows to how I see fit.
Worse news: it starts by expanding the team asap as 10 projects accounting to 4000 man hours with deadlines in Q3.
Wish me luck. It's going to be twisted Rollercoaster ride...4 -
I can agree to shit when presented with hardcore data, data that proves me otherwise. But when people go by opinions and then hold is a truth because of "many feel the same way" I cannot help but to giggle a bit.
Most issues I have found with programming stacks come from opinions rather than hard presented data, if a bunch of people dislike a tool, but it delivers, I get to differ two things: (1) it is bad but it performs as needed, but it is bad because of design problems etc, (2) some dude made a post concerning why he things is bad and sheep mentality follows.
If technologies were without merit, then we would have all discarded C++ a long time ago cuz Linus disliked it, a powerful programmer indeed, but a FOCUSED one, meaning, one that deals with 1 domain (kernel development)
Do I care about what Linus things about web development? No, lol, he is a better kernel developer than I am, but I highly, grossly doubt that he knows enough about web development to give me something to think about.
all languages have faults, regardless of what point of view we look at them, but completely disregarding a tech stack because of shit that you saw some fucktard wrote about, benefits and otherwise, just seems....well...sheepish, there might very well be a tech stack out there that covers everything, to me it is a mixture of things, and I use them as I please and feel like, but this is because after years of learning I have read about quirks and pitfalls and how to avoid them. I would suggest you all do the same, by you all I mean those of high opinions that can't be deflected.
This field is far too wide and concentrated to go head and think about absolutes when even the fundamental mathematical theory concerning computer science is not absolute whatsoever, it is akin to magic, shit works, but it might not, the incantation might be right, but circuits and electricity have a way of telling us to go fuck ourselves, so do architectures, specifically ones based on physics.3 -
I want to share this story and need your advise.
When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.
He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.
When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).
After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.
After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.
I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?16 -
So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.
So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.
But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.
My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.
Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.
I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(2 -
Ive seen a bollywood movie about a developer but the movie was basically him roundhouse kicking bad guys in leather jackets for like an hour and gotta say, thats an accurate depiction of software development.6
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Great to be back on devrant after so many months. I just got fired from my first dev job which took most of my time and energy and gave me back weight gain and some react and Node.js knowledge.
It feels so good to be free. I never liked web development anyway.4 -
I can't stop procrastinating from doing what I need to do. This extends to even web development and coding on personal projects, which is something I really enjoy doing.
It's as if I have some sort of underlying fear holding me back each time I get the chance to get things done. Normally I don't have the time and make the excuse for myself that there "is not enough time" but tbh I now literally have an entire week in front of me free, with nobody to distract me. I am actually getting my long-desired time alone. I can finally power through all the things that require intense focus, like coding.
And yet, I can't bring myself to just do it. Instead I make excuses and go play video games instead (Overwatch has been a really bad time sink for me). I haven't been able to do what I wanted to for like a year now. What the fuck is wrong with me?
I need help guys!! Anyone have advice for me?9 -
Im now working as a fulltime dev for 3 years. I do programming since im 9 and now that I collected some experience, I have to to say, its horrible. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with german internship companys? Letting me do 3 years of FUCKING CRYSTAL REPORTS. IN A DEVELOPMENT TEAM THAT CONSISTS OF A TEAM LEAD THAT ACTUALLY HAS TO LEARN SHIT LIKE PROPER OOP AND ASYNC/AWAIT FROM ME. THEY EVEN ASKED ME IF I CAN DROP OF MY HOBBY PROJECTS TO WORK ON SAMPLES THAT THEY CAN LEARN FROM! NO! FUCK! JUST BECAUSE THESE DOUCHBAGS ARE TOO LAZY TO FUCKING LEARN TECHNOLOGY THEY SHOULD BE PASSIONATE ABOUT IN THEIR FREE TIME, IM NOT MAKING IT MY JOB TO FREAKING SHOW THEM THAT HAVING A STATIC CLASS CONTAINING ALL MODELS EVER EXISTED IN THE APP IS A BAD THING! SERIOUSLY, THERES ONLY ONE INSTANCE OF EVERY MODEL WE HAVE! AND THEN THEY BLAME SQL SERVER FOR RACE CONDITIONS WHEN TRYING ASYNC!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!! AND STILL, IF I TELL THEM WHATS WRONG, IM AN IDIOT BECAUSE IM A JUNIOR! Please tell me that i didnt waste 10 years of my life dedicating to such bullshit. Will that change? Is it company specific?9
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So, in my company we where initially about 20 programmers doing two big projects.
The client (who also is the owner of the company) keep asking more and more and more things. Each 3 months we update the site but the client doesn't start the marketing or anything else, so the app don't have any users.
After two years of development, 26 micro services, one big web platform in Python (web2py, bad decision) and a hybrid mobile app the client decide to shut down the project because it was "a little bit illegal".
The second project have the same problems, but this project does have marketing, the shitty part is after two year and a lot of development now the project isn't viable because the market is gone.
The boss calls, says he have some problems and he will fire 18 persons and reduce the payment of the rest, he ask us to "hold" for the good times.
The great idea he had for earn money is rewriting a WordPress app that have 4 years in production to angular (because he, who knows why, thinks angular is the best shit out there)
I want to quit but even with the reduced payment I know he pays way more than the market average, plus I'm still student.1 -
Was on my first internship, told to analyse and prepare stuff for the Android dev to build an application for a big client. Did it before the end of the internship and team was satisfied with my job.
Because the Android dev had already lot of works on other stuff they let me start the development of the app.
The end of my internship is coming, the app is not finished but the team agreed that my work is not bad and that I should continue to work on it.
I finally get hired to finish the app, when we first publish it 95% of the code was mine and the boss started to stress because he let an intern (that became an employee) build the application from the ground. But the application got quickly its 4.5 stars on the playstore and more than 10.000 downloads.
I quit the job a few time after the publication of the app but I feel proud and happy that this team let me work on one of the biggest project they had as I was only an intern without any professional experience.
This is not "badass" but this is my first and best experience in the professional world ! -
This picture represents a whole lot of things for me in software development when it comes to bad design or security... You add a new feature along the way and it seems to work well - but basically you f-ed everything up.5
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I love web development and web design. You can make something custom that looks great in a short period of time. Use the many frameworks to your advantage.
Also, for the people hating css, i get it. It's har sometimes but it's not that bad. Flexbox makes your life waaay easier.5 -
2020 seems to be the year of the "dev who has never seen scale."
TypeA -> "Here's a reasoned explanation for a change I think we should make. Here is the current deficiency analysis, here is the desired resolution, here is the course of action and all calculations leading to the resolution + data. This will have x,y,z beneficial result according to our operational metrics."
TypeD -> "Those were words. Why do you need that? Change is bad, learning is worse. This will just slow me down, development speed is all that matters; there is no chance that a poorly considered/factored/checked design could ever require a ground up rewrite or fuck us utterly in the long term. Why do you make my life harder? We could x -> y -> zBUTI haven't done the math and I really don't see the benefit in x, so z is pointless. What even is scale?"
The consequences of the war caused by the ever-widening gap between engineers and developers is low key terrifying.12 -
I don't know what you did yesterday, but i did make my company throw away 2 months of progress.
It all started in the beginning, since that i've made numerous complaints about the workflow or code and how to improve it. I've been told off every time, and every time i either told the boss who agreed in the end or wrote code to prove myself. Everything was a hassle and my tasks weren't better.
Team lead: you'll do X now, please do that by making Y.
Me: but Y is insecure, we should do Z.
Team lead: please do Y
Later it turns out Y is impossible and we do Z in the end...
Team lead: please do W now
Me, a few days later: i've tried and their server doesn't give http cors headers, doing W in the browser is impossible
Team lead, a few days later: have you made progress on W?
Me: * tells again it's impossible and uploads code to prove it *
Team lead: * no response *
After that i had enough. Technically i still was assigned to do W, but i used my time to look over the application and list all the things wrong with it. We had everything, giant commits, commented out code, unnecessary packages, a new commit introduced packages that crashed npm install on non-macs, angularjs-packages even though we use angular, weird logic, a security bug, all css in one file even though you can use component-specific css files...
I sent that to my boss, telling him to let the backend-guys have a look at it too and we had a meeting about this. I couldn't attend but they agreed with me completely. They decided to throw away what we have already and to let one of the backend-guys supervise our team. I guess there will be another talk with the team lead, but time will tell.
It feels so good having hope to finally escape this hellish development cycle of badly defined task, bad communication and headache-inducing merges. -
This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month
Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..
The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)
During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.
During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.
The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.
Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.
Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..
Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..2 -
So I just recently had the pleasure to set up a Rails environment for a friend on Windows. I haven't used Windows in about 5 or 6 years, and the person I had to set it up for doesn't know much about programming at all.
I all went fine at first, install database, devkit thingy and git. Then set up the project itself. And there is where the problems started.
First windows would refuse to use SSL, because of some weird bug in the Windows version of rubygems. The suggested upgrade did not work so I had to switch some gem sources to insecure connections, but at least it did install everything correctly.
Alright, I thought, that's not _that_ bad, everything is running now.
He sent me a screenshot some time later. Something was wrong with the JavaScript runtime, and I could not figure out for the life of me what the issue was.
Later again he sent me another screenshot.
His Antivirus spyware was messing with the asset pipeline. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
This was the point where I just said "FUCK IT, i'll just put everything into a fucking VM and let him use that".
I should have done that in the first place.
Long story short:
Setting up a development under Windows is painful.
Do yourself a favor and just use a VM.3 -
My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...
A little detail - I was 12 back then.
So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.
Discussion started and well, what came out was this:
1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).
So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).
We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.
They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...
So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.2 -
Just needing somewhere to let some steam off
Tl;dr: perfectly fine commandline system is replaced by bad ui system because it has a ui.
For a while now we have had a development k8s cluster for the dev team. Using helm as composing framework everything worked perfectly via the console. Being able to quickly test new code to existing apps, and even deploy new (and even third party apps) on a simar-to-production system was a breeze.
Introducing Rancher
We are now required to commit every helm configuration change to a git repository and merge to master (master is used on dev and prod) before even being able to test the the configuration change, as the package is not created until after the merge is completed.
Rolling out new tags now also requires a VCS change as you have to point to the docker image version within a file.
As we now have this awesome new system, the ops didn't see a reason to give us access to kubectl. So the dev team is stuck with a ui, but this should give the dev team more flexibility and independence, and more people from the team can roll releases.
Back to reality: since the new system we have hogged more time from ops than we have done in a while, everyone needs to learn a new unintuitive tool, and the funny thing, only a few people can actually accept VCS changes as it impacts dev and prod. So the entire reason this was done, so it is reachable to more people, is out the window.3 -
Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.
DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”
Today, DevC was talking to DevA
DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”
It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight. -
The primary concept of reactive programming is great. The idea that things just naturally re-run when anything they rely on is changed is amazing. Really, I think it's the next step in programming language development and within a decade or two at least one of the top 5 programming languages will be built entirely on this principle.
BUT
Expecting every dependency to be used unconditionally is stupid. Code that checks everything it might need all the time even if a decision can be made from much less information is simply bad, inefficient code. If you want to build a list of dependencies automatically, you have to parse the source.
And I really hate that there are TONS of languages that either make the AST readable at runtime or ship with a very powerful preprocessor that could be used to analyse expressions and build dependency lists, but by its sheer popularity the language we're trying to knead into something it was never and still isn't meant to be is JavaScript.3 -
I am a bad developer. I know nothing. I had a very simple requirement just to change the strings.
I couldn't collect all the requirements. I connected with PM offline, slow replies and miscommunications. Ahh!! How will I be shipping bigger projects? I have 3 years of development, in my last company we worked totally different though.
So, at the time when I thought I will be raising a PR I am stuck on the requirements.
I am a dumb shit. I can't do anything right. A simple requirement I am not able to deliver. I am so embarassed. :(12 -
How ignorant we all are about the world. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact. After a four year degree I've learnt so much, how a computer works from the physical phenomena on the hardware level to the inner workings of an OS to the highest level abstractions of modern web development, a wide array of programming languages covering several different paradigms, mathematics from calculus to statistics to algebra, how to work with databases, how to administrate a server, how to build a website, and much more.
And that's just in a degree. I have knowledge in one domain and I wouldn't even call myself an expert in it. Medicine, physics, biology, the hundreds of branches of engineering from civil to nautical to aerospace to automobile, to geology to meteorology to astronomy, to the practical application of this knowledge in hundreds of trades. There's so much more to know in so much depth and only recently have I realized how little we all know on an individual level.
Finding this out has been a mixed bag, on the one hand it's made me value what I know and what others can teach me a hell of a lot more, on the other, knowing that people haven't realized this and adamantly discuss and impose from a position of ignorance isn't very nice.
tl;dr I know that I know nothing3 -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.
Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.
One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.
At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"
And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.
But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?
I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.
What do y'all ninjas think?8 -
Ok apparently I forgot rants can only be edited within the first 5 minutes, I thought it was 30, and you can't rant 2 times in 2 hours so I'll have to wait before posting this.
So, I'm doing a Genetic Algorithms class, something I liked since I was 15 yo and didn't know shit about coding, but I loved the carykh videos about it. (here is part 1: https://youtu.be/GOFws_hhZs8 )
The yearly class consisted of 3 little projects to be able to do the final exam and an investigation project to pass the subject without a final exam.
We had to make teams, and I got together with 5 more people.
I have a lot to say about these 5 people, but the only thing I'll say is that I was the most experienced programmer among the 6 of us, if they had any experience at all. Mind this is a third cycle class.
We were allowed to use any technology, as long as we wrote the important algorithms by hand, of course.
The development of the first project was such a mess, that one of the members left the subject.
While developing the second one, we were given the topic for the investigation project; fractals.
It took a lot for us to find an application of fractals where we could use genetic algorithms. Once we found it, fractal antennas, we had to learn about antennas, so we interviewed professionals, and such. We ended up learning to evaluate antennas.
We also found a site that used some parameters to generate fractals, we had the parameterization.
We just had to code it. It was July and we just had to code it by October.
We were 5 people, and "we" were so busy writing the little projects, we fucking couldn't finish the investigation project.
We just had to write the proper algorithms and GUI specifics, without even having to write boilerplate (we used the first project as a template), and they still took so much that we didn't have time for the important project.
That sucked, because I had been coding and investigating in many weekends, I spent countless hours on them, I had to pause development on other projects for these ones; and after all that we have to do the (very shitty) final exam.
Since May, the average people together "working" on the different projects was 2.6. And 100% of the time, I was one of them.
We tried to speed up things in the last months but even with the deadline on us and the project not even started, there was no time we all got to work together.
Dude projects don't just get made, someone has to develop them.
It's so sad we had the project ready to be made and 5 people couldn't finish it. There was so little to do to pass and yet these people couldn't.
I guess it's my bad too. I wish I could rush the project in a couple of weeks, but unfortunately the guy with a job and 8 other subjects can't.
You can find the project in my GitHub. I'll do a requiem of what it was to be one of these days, after I catch up with all I left aside for this subject...rant genetic algorithms project systems engineering failure subject college investigation fractals wk2833 -
Why are most developers/software engineers so absolutely fucking shit at their craft?
I understand incompetence exists in every occupation but it seems in development the ratio of bad developers to good developers is like 9:1. There’s a serious lack of quality in this industry and it’s only further exacerbated by coding bootcamps and orgs like general assembly pumping out more dog shit9 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part III)
The next mentor is my former boss in the previous company I worked.
3.- Manager DJ.
Soon after I joined the company, Manager E.A. left and it was crushing. The next in line joined as a temporal replacement; he was no good.
Like a year later, they hired Manager DJ, a bit older than EA, huge experience with international companies and a a very smart person.
His most valuable characteristic? His ability to listen. He would let you speak and explain everything and he would be there, listening and learning from you.
That humility was impressive for me, because this guy had a lot of experience, yes, but he understood that he was the new guy and he needed to learn what was the current scenario before he could twist anything. Impressive.
We bonded because I was technical lead of one of the dev teams, and he trusted me which I value a lot. He'd ask me my opinion from time to time regarding important decisions. Even if he wouldn't take my advice, he valued the opinion of the developers and that made me trust him a lot.
From him I learned that, no matter how much experience you have in one field, you can always learn from others and if you're new, the best you can do is sit silently and listen, waiting for your moment to step up when necessary, and that could take weeks or months.
The other thing I learned from him was courage.
See, we were a company A formed of the join of three other companies (a, b, c) and we were part of a major group of companies (P)
(a, b and c) used the enterprise system we developed, but internally the system was a bit chaotic, lots of bad practices and very unstable. But it was like that because those were the rules set by company P.
DJ talked to me
- DJ: Hey, what do you think we should do to fix all the problems we have?
- Me: Well, if it were up to me, we'd apply a complete refactoring of the system. Re-engineering the core and reconstruct all modules using a modular structure. It's A LOT of work, A LOT, but it'd be the way.
- DJ: ...
- DJ: What about the guidelines of P?
- Me: Those guidelines are obsolete, and we'd probably go against them. I know it's crazy but you asked me.
Some time later, we talked about it again, and again, and again until one day.
- DJ: Let's do it. Take these 4 developers with you, I rented other office away from here so nobody will bother you with anything else, this will be a semi-secret project. Present me a methodology plan, and a rough estimation. Let's work with weekly advances, and if in three months we have something good, we continue that road, tear everything apart and implement the solution you guys develop.
- Me: Really? That's impressive! What about P?
- DJ: I'll handle them.
The guy would battle to defend us and our work. And we were extremely motivated. We did revolutionize the development processes we had. We reconstructed the entire system and the results were excellent.
I left the company when we were in the last quarter of the development but I'm proud because they're still using our solution and even P took our approach.
Having the courage of going against everyone in order to do the right thing and to do things right was an impressive demonstration of self confidence, intelligence and balls.
DJ and I talk every now and then. I appreciate him a lot.
Thank you DJ for your lessons and your trust.
Part I:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...
Part II:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483875/...1 -
So I got a telephone interview for a job that a recruiter found for me. Call went well, comes to the development test. Small application in ruby on rails, haven't used it in about 2-3 years so a tad rusty. Completed the test under two days (was given until Friday) not too bad if I say so myself. It's for a junior position anyway so I'll assume they wouldn't mind giving me a refresher to help jog my memory.
-
I run update without where on mysql console on production database Today.
CLASSIC
Just because I needed to fix database after bug fix on the backend of the application.
I thought I wrote good sql statement after executing it on my local machine and then everything got bad.
Luckily it was only one column with some cached statistics data and I checked that it was not important data before I actually started fixing stuff but still ...
Almost got hard attack afterwards.
Made a script to fix this column and it took me only 15 minutes but still...
Bug was caused in part I got no unit tests and application grow after 3 years of development from simple one for one customer and volumes of documents around 50k to over 40 customers and volumes over 2mil per month, don’t know how many pages each, just in one year after we completed all needed features.
I have daily backups and logs of every api operation but still.
I think this got to far for one backend developer.
I got scared that I will loose money cause I am contractor and the only backend developer working on it.
I am so tired of this right now I think I need a break from work.
Responsibility is killing me so hard right now.
It will take a week to get back to normal.2 -
I'm writing a devrant like site, so a kind of forum that supports live chat under every article. Login will be just username and password to stay anonymous. Email is optional for password reset. Also it won't have password requirements. Who cares if user uses insecure password. I do like the devrant avatar thing. I will use the ducky generator instead. So everyone on the site is a custom duck. K-SASS prolly never expected his generator to be used anywhere. The requirement of this site is that it scales very well. I have db calls of 0.006s, this is for persistent data only and will be used by all site instances. I expect that it can handle many clients concurrent as long I do not return more than 30 rows or so. Events get handled by a self written pubsub server.
All sounds great and development goes fine. But why is this a rant? Because the same thing as always is biting me, I can't design a site at all. I know how but I don't have any feeling for design at all making me almost incapable of building an attractive site. The only thing I can 'design' is an application in bootstrap or smth. I spend so much time one design while I don't like to do it ironically. But looks of site is almost as important as an good working site. Good working site doesn't get used if looks bad in many casee. This is since the start of my career an issue and it sucks that I appearantly can't deliver a whole site on my own meeting my standards.
My backend work is top notch tho. Btw, this application is not to be an alternative for devrant. I do not think I can attract more users than it already has and I've seen two communities disappearing once because someone decided to make a new one, took half of community with him and both communities died after short while.
End product of this project is a working project, not a live site hosted somewhere. It's pure about mixing mostly self written tech to get the best performance. Reinventing wheel on many levels. I wanted maybe to do the site in C but decided that it's way to much work for the value. I change the site so rapid since I don't have decent plan that python aiohttp is the best choice in amount of writing it yourself and fast. It's very lightweight.
More a story than a rant, sorry27 -
It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."
Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.
We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.
Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.
* * *
In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.
I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.
After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.
Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.
We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.
Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.
And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.
What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.
Just don't.17 -
So one of my co-partner in a website development business we started, took up back end responsibilities from me, didn't complete a simple form handling in 3 months and then complained the 3rd partner that it was my work and I didn't do it and now I am the bad guy.
FUCK YOU BRO!6 -
Do you know one major thing (among others of course) that has made devrant feel like home for me after swearing off social media for a long time?
Common ground with users dealing with absolute, insane incompetency at work (I have it real bad at my job).
This doesn't so much make me angry or frustrate me as it makes me sad.
Everyone has varying levels of intelligence in infinite disciplines. Someone could make you cry because they play violin so beautifully but they can't tell you 4 + 4 because they are completely dense, but boy are they genius with that instrument.
Everyone is GREAT at something, that's capitalism's strength! Everyone can excel! I'm lucky enough to truly in my heart believe that programming, data and game development is my true calling...and I personally think I'm amazing at it.
It breaks my heart when people fall into or pursue something that clearly they just don't have enough passion for or regardless just don't have the skill for.
They become toxic to themselves, their employees/coworkers, their industry.
Sadly, power is given to people who simply aren't capable and power is bad on so many levels (aka fucking psychopaths gaining too much power) but it's also bad when people who don't know what they're doing or care get power.
People, I implore you...the secret to happiness and fulfillment in life is finding what makes you happy and what you're passionate about and good at and gripping it until you die.
Most people don't find it....but DON'T stop looking! It took me until my 30's to figure it out. My best friend in her 20's took her life because she couldn't find purpose...don't just be an asshat, incompetent manager in an industry you don't know a fuck about. Love what you do and help others excel.
This is how I get when I'm drunk, sorry. You guys will learn, lol.2 -
There is this dude called Richard Eng which is sort of famous for 2 things:
First: he is known as *the* Smalltall evangelist of mothern times. And he constantly writes about it. Which is fine since he tries to attract new users to this beautiful and simple little language.
Second: his constant bashing of other technologies, mainly Javascript stating that it is the most harmful tech known to man.
The thing is, saying "use this because that is shit" is never going to convince a community, specifically one as potent as that of the JS community. And to make it worse...the dude links his reasoning about bad languages to articles he wrote. As in "this is shit, look at my completely biased article regarding why its shit"
Once he is confronted about it he links back to his own writings. Much like christian fanatics do
"good is real because it says so in the bible"
"but how can you trust that resource?"
"Because the bible is the word of God"
"and how do you know?"
"Because it is in the bible"
Circular arguments like that cannot be taken seriously. And what this guy does for the Smalltalk community hurts more than it helps really.
Claims like those are all around us. If we were to believe or consider them depending on who said what then we would never have the amazing cluster of tech choices that we have.
Take c++. It is absolutely powerful and gives you the ability to do pretty much anything. If we were to take Linus Torvalds's word about it being shit and only having subpar development we would miss on absolutely powerful tools.
The same came to me from Evee, writer of "PHP a fractal of bad design" or the "Node.js is cancer" article.
You are never going to please anyone with anything. I go by live and let live, and whilst I don't like some technologies I certainly don't look down on those that do.4 -
What are your favorite distros for Linux? I'm new to Linux so I'm just curious on what's out there that you guys use most and what's most convenient for development! Also can I PLEASE get some upvotes I want an avatar so bad lol8
-
It's was the forth year of my college, in the corner of the world in south India, I wanted to something to combine both medicine and the coding that I learnt, I started learning about heart murmurs, it's basically a skill based diagnosis that only 1 in 20 heart specialists can make by hearing the heart beat and listening to a small murmur that happens during the systolic cycle or the diastolic cycle. I wrote a program to learn a lot of sample murmurs and try to find (very bad hand made logic) the similarities between two wave patterns, the problem started with noise so I went out and built a new stethoscope with a carbon mic inside a normal stethoscope head and try filtering the sound at source (worked well enough at that time) I then tried to find people to test it on, but alas I was not able to find patients as doctors are not supposed to reveal them etc. I wanted to show them visually how a murmur pattern would look like and I stole some code and made a plotter for the wav file and presented everything. By that time I got a lot of close amazing friends involved and they helped me solidify the project and we won the best project award and I got my first gold medal of my life at the end of my academic life :) it was one of the best moments of my life. Second only to the joy of getting married to wife. May be third if I put getting a job in Microsoft India Development Center.
I still wish I could dig that code up and write it properly with what I have learnt today but work is never ending and I find great problems to solve everyday which I know I can make a difference, may be when I get retired I will dust out that CD with the decades old c++ code and write one last program...3 -
It's over.
I've been working on you for months, and thinking about you for near a year.
I built you with a shitty language first and some crappy ideas. I obviously got bad results, but I didn't lose courage and I continued you.
Got near the obsession to improve you. Every time. Switched to a fast but hard language. Got into my first low-level fuss. All for you.
Now I reached the end with no more improvements and tweaks I could imagine, I can tell that:
I had a lot of expectations from you.
But turns out you were nothing more than a nasty brain fart pretending to be a good idea.
The core of the concept was rotten. Blinded by my lust for success (perhaps cupidity ?) I didn't see you just couldn't work.
I'm utterly disgusted, of course. Who wouldn't, after working so hard on something that looks right but is completely useless ?
But even though this was all in vain, you taught me some great lessons down the road.
Efficiency matters over facility.
Get sure you're using the right tools, and stay open for changes of such.
But some others were harsher, though just as important.
There's times you just have to admit defeat.
Putting a lot of efforts into something doesn't always bring a reward.
If after a long time you can't get the thing right, then stop. Your time is precious. Don't waste your time or time will waste you (Thanks Muse, I love this sentence).
And the most important: next time I got some "grand" idea that is not about improving some random software, I'll bang my head to my desk enough times to forget about it.
So now the time has come.
Goodbye, project "hpym". You put me in grief, but I know I matured a lot in my concepts of development because of you.
Now take place into the project graveyard among the other clunky half-assed shit I got rid off.6 -
At work we have to split a potentially large ID into 2 10-digit long parts that will be passed to an outside system that will later return them with some more data to us.
A colleague had implemented it using regular expression, it passed code review, everything was ok, until he noticed a potential problem. For some cases, because the outside system stores them as int and therefore will remove any leading zeros, there will be no way to reconstruct the number.
So we brainstorm and I propose ether a modified regex, or to just use math like part1 = id % 10^10 and part2 = floor(id % 10^10) and then we can reconstruct it simply by: part2 * 10000000000 + part1
Colleague: - Well, the regex will be faster, there won't be any calculations
Me: - :| I disagree but ok..
We do some more brainstorming and testing and find a case where the proposed new regex fails as well
So I bring up my previous proposal, I explain what exactly it does.
Colleague: - I don't like the math, it has calculations, which won't be needed before we reach the 11th digit
Have I missed some major development in computer hardware? When did they become bad/slow at doing math? :|8 -
Many "purists" love to piss on JavaScript and web development. And to an extent I can understand ostream’s frustration with these people.
It’s easy to criticize because yes: many web projects are indeed shit.
But I’d like to argue that the reason why so many of these projects are crappy is because of bad management:
- unrealistic deadlines
- no clear testing strategy
- or no testing at all because of deadlines
- no time allotted to catch up on technical debt
- etc.
This type of management is far more commonplace in web projects because things need to get delivered quickly and if they’re delivered with bugs, it’s no big deal as lives aren’t at stake.
I doubt this type of management is tolerated in projects where you’re working on software for welding machines (for example), where the stakes are that "you’re expected not to kill anyone" (to quote demolishun)
So in these types of projects, management can’t tolerate anything much below perfection and thus has to adapt by setting realistic deadlines that take into account the need for quality processes and thorough testing.
If this type of management was more common in web development, I can guarantee that web applications would be much more reliable and of better quality.
I can also guarantee that poorly managed non-web projects as outlined above would be just shitty as many web products.
My point being that’s it’s really DUMB to criticize fellow devs that work with web technologies on the basis that the state of websites/web apps is a mess. It just so happens that JS is the language of the web and that the web is where things are expected to be delivered quickly (and dirty … but we can fix it later mentality)
Stop acting like you’re the elite. I have no doubt you’re super smart and great at what you do. So be smart all the way and stop criticizing us poor webdevs that have to live with the sad state of affairs. ❤️38 -
So it turns out I was interviewing for a senior role, when in fact I'm looking for a junior-mid role.
Two days ago I had a bad feeling creep up on me when the HR interviewer mentioned to me that they were looking to fill a senior role. I should have interjected. Instead, I stupidly asked the recruiter after passing the HR interview. He answered that the company would also take a mid-level developer and he thinks that I have a good chance. In retrospective, I'm not sure on what basis he made the judgement call.
I had the technical interview today and didn't get the job as I expected. But the same recruiter told me that the company said they'd take me for an intermediate role in the future, but I didn't make it for the senior role.
Can I take that as "you're not technically sound enough" put in a nicer way to soften the blow? But by the company or the recruiter? Or would they actually consider me for a mid-level role in the future? Who is lying or not lying?
Steam off my head now. Thanks for reading my rant.
Context: I'm still transitioning from another field and barely had one year of web development experience so far, half of which was from where I just learned to hack stuff together. I'm now going to focus on landing an internship or a junior role, without going through recruiters since I'd be waste of their time.15 -
I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...
So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).
Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.
Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.
What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...
The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.
The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.
Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.
One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...
Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.
Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.
Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..
ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....
Ahh yess....
Clean code..
Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...
I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.
OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..
Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.15 -
!dev
i think i need to control my emotions and expression around girls. things are going quite wrong and i am not sure i am able to interact with this beautiful gender correctly.
<misc: somewhat unrelated event. need to vent>
- got called out "a creep", "jerk", and "hypocrite" by this girl. she may be totally correct in calling me these but these words made me think about my behavior and therefore this post .
- characters? she: a friend of a friend, to whom i have met 3-4 times, in trips where we drank together, danced together nd talked till late night, among other people.
me : well me . based on previous allegations you can also label me as creep and hypocrite , but i would describe myself as an introvert, nerdy person who talks better on a keyboard than real life (otherwise i wouldn't be typing this post but whatever.)
- action : i made a comment on her insta story
- action details:
• we follow each other on insta. it was 12 am and i was in a half sleep state, scrolling the damn app before falling asleep
• saw her story with his 3 girl nd 2 guy cousins probably, so out of fun, replied her about how all of their specs look the same and if they all take out their specs from the same shop (cheeky comment, i know)
• she just erupted. from asking whether i also wanna buy from the same shop, to why am i talking to her, who gave you the right to compliment, jerk, hypocrite who can't talk in real life but compliments on keyboard, to creep and "stay away"
• I really wanted to say sorry at some point, but i kept making more cheeky comments in between. i was like , yeah she is my friend going through something and bursting her anger on me, she will come back and laugh, but she kept going towards hypocrite, jerk and finally stay away thing
• after that i knew i crossed the line and immediately got out of the conversation. i didn't apologize though.
• as of now am calm and don't mind the current situation of she being angry at a person who means nothing to her and me realising she is not a friend but a common connection . and till the time i was making cheeky comments, i saw her as my homie friend, so i am not bothered if she is angry
</misc>
I think i am a very needy person. i didn't have many friends in school time and i didn't had any relatives/cousins/siblings to get a lot of affection. a 25 yo horny virgin with no relationships till date does give a bad personality vibe from far, but keep in mind that i have mainly focused on personality growth and a conservative chsracter development my whole life. i do not act on my lonly feelings, but i try to be helpful and nice to everyone (which might be a suspicious/bad thing. just trying to defend my character, but feel free to judge)
every girl that talks nice with me, i get very helpful, nice and cheeky with them. most girls likes nd ignores these things, but some also get along, trust me and are willing to spend more time with me.
This makes me not only be more nice and cheeky with them but also start developing feelings for them and imagining my future/relation with them.
as of now i think there are 12 or 13 girls with whom i got into "vibing" (here, assume that vibing means me talking with them, cracking jokes nd compliments, meeting them alone ,etc. no adult stuff ofc), nd then after a few days told them directly or indirectly that i like them ( in a hope of getting some affection back i guess), getting rejected and still trying to keep the "friendship"
i think this needs to be changed. the people calling me creep, despo, perv , whatever might be correct in calling me those till now(based in my behavior) but i don't wanna be that.
i need to understand the girls might not want anything more than just a help at some point and then be done with it. I shouldn't be going out a limb and trying to get i to conversation/flirt/whatever.
i just am too emotional to let any person go away from my life just because our reason for interaction is over.
If I am commenting on a girl's post to whom i met on some trip, i will be commenting on a guy's post (to whom i met on a similar trip) too , in a similar manner,
if i see a post from one of my school's batchmates , and i find it nice/funny/weird, i will comment as if me and this batchmate met yesterday and not for 1 hr 10 years ago (irrespective of the gender)
and even after that if people are so intolerant, then maybe i am wrong and rather should start forgetting every person with whom i have spent less than 50 days alone.
hope this is the correct math and i could expect people with 50 days = 600+ hours of daytime to be enough to not see me as a stranger7 -
I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.
Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:
//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO
# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO
# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO
# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO
# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO
# Do not read the documentation. YOLO
# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO
# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)
# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO
# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO
# You always use production as an environment. YOLO
# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO
# Don’t indent. YOLO
# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO
# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO
# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO
# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO
So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.
*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.
*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.
*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.
*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.
*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.2 -
FUCK YOU TO GODDAMN MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURE!
I just want to be able to extensively test stuff on my machine before shipping it instead of being able to test it only partially because shit depends of tons of stuff unavailable locally, get dozens of messages from teammates when unforseeable circumstances (bad data items on the shared noSQL DB created by other services which makes mine fail, cloud issues...) makes my service return 500 and then struggle in tracing the problem because there they're just too many layers of shit to manually inspect.
I can't wait to move towards iOS or desktop development.7 -
One day, one of my clients asked me to re-design their website that is running on Wix. I thought It was not a big deal... Just a couple fucking drag-drops & boom.
But while designing, I realized what a fucking piece of shit Wix developers made over time. I've never used to suck a disgusting website builder ever in my entire life.
I write codes to build any type of website, web app etc. I was happily living my dev life. But, after using Wix for 24 fucking hours, I hate my job as a web developer.
Wix is so bad that I lose all my confidence & doubt about my 5 years of web development career.
Fucking piece of shit.4 -
After creating my own PHP MVC framework with Twig as templating engine, everything is now so simple and so fast, I juat cant belive how much I understand now. The development is just so smooth, you know exactly what to do all the time... And for my simple project, it does not even hurt that much to use PHP (and its even strictly typed 7.2, so not that bad). I think that I am in love. ❤6
-
How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:
Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.
Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.
But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.
Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.
I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.
To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.
Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.9 -
It took literally days to get our software installed onto the client VMs and get the services started correctly.
On our own test VMs the same task takes all of about an hour or so. Mind you these VMs are supposed to be created and match the client's environment almost too the T. Same configurations, same third party software, same environment variables and the whole 9 yards.
This was not the case at all.
Environment variables were not set, third party software was not installed, and I honestly don't remember the list of things wrong with how they setup the VM. Sparing the details, the errors were also not helpful.
They also gave us critical information we needed for development days before we were going on site to test. The amount of hackery we had to do could be a completely separate rant on its own.
While desperately trying to to stay sane long enough to get our services started, the only thing I could think was how great it would be if there was a fire or something. Anything, just to have an excuse to go back to the hotel and actually sleep. The second day there we finally had everything installed and running.
I shit you not, just as we began our first test, the fire alarms went off.
At this point in time the team was extremely (pissed tf off) annoyed to put it mildly. Assuming it was just a drill, we left our stuff and went to eat dinner. After we came back we found out it in fact was not a drill...
Moral of the story:
Don't wish bad fortune on a customer even if out of impulsive spite.
Other moral of the story:
Don't leave your belongings behind only because you think the fire alarms are just a fire drill. It may not be.
P.S. Karma's a bitch.1 -
*Screaming Internally* I'm really, REALLY, stressed.
We just entered the final sprint for the finishing of a major project. This is my first "Launch" type achievement since I started working as a programmer(I started almost exactly a year ago)
We have a lot of work done on the project, and it's very clearly near "Completion" but we all know a programmers job is never done.
But specifically I've been thinking about the code i've worked on. I've been at the burnt out phase of the development for a week now, I haven't been getting a lot done, and I can't help but stress that my code is going to be what breaks on launch day and i'm going to get canned or something...
It's not that i'm a bad programmer(at least I don't think) but more or less that I just have been so stressed I think I've made some mistakes, and I think it's going to blow up in my face, and I might lose my job over it.
How do you guys deal with work stress?1 -
Started a new job this week, picking up the front end development of a property management system, since they're old developer just left.
Oh my god was his code bad, inconsistent use of js versions e.g only sometimes using lambda for anonymous functions, variable names that were a single letter, no comments, no documentation, and over 30000 lines split into almost 30 js files, following the logic of it is as fun as a hedge maze with no exit.2 -
<rant>
I was once a pure server side developer. Then came full stack development. So in order to keep up with the competition, I had to brave through front-end development.
But goddamn javascript, make up your mind between functions, and “Objects”.
Also variable visibility. Goddamnit. I thought ES6 was widely supported. I was happy doing const and let bbut goddamn testing frameworks, grunt and shit. Can’t make up it’s mind to support it unitedly.
And lastly, IE. Goddamn it, why the fuck are you not supporting Promise by default. We’re fucking 2017. [insert slowpoke meme]
</rant>
One good thing though, I like the library vuejs.
Bad thing is, this is just the beginning of a much more upcoming headache.4 -
Hi guys! I need your help.
I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.
The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.
If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.
What do you guys think?7 -
FUCK YOU PHP, FUCK YOU SYMFONY AND DEFINITELY FUCK YOU SHOPWARE.
Don't get me wrong, PHP has evolved a lot, but the stuff people are building with it is just the biggest load of fucking shit I have ever seen: Shopware. Shopware is the most ass-sucking abomination to extend. It's nearly impossible to develop anything beyond "use the standard features and shut the fuck up" that is more sophisticated than a fucking calculator.
The architecture of this pile of crap is the worst bullshit ever. A mix of OOP, randomly making use of non OOP concepts and features together with the unnecessarily HUGE amount of useless interfaces and classes. Sometimes I feel like it's 90% fucking shitty boilerplate shit.
And don't get me started with TWIG. It's a nice thought, but WHY THE BLOODY FUCK WOULD YOU NOT USE VUE IF YOU ARE ALREADY USING IT FOR A DIFFERENT PART OF SHOPWARE. This makes no fucking sense whatsoever and makes development of new features a huge pain in the ass. I can't comprehend how people actually like using this shit.
OH AND THE DATABASE. OH MY FUCKING GOD. This one is bad. Ever tried to figure anything out in a database where random strings (yes MySQL "relational" - you might think) that are stored as text in a JSON format make up some object or relations during runtime?? Why the fuck do you have foreign and primary keys if you don't use them properly??
Seriously you can't even figure out which data belongs to what because the architecture just sucks fucking ass. FUCK YOU Shopware wankers, you suck, your product sucks, your support sucks, your architecture sucks and you keep releasing new versions that regularly break shit even in minor versions.
I used to like PHP, but not in projects like these.7 -
BPOS client sub contracts a website and wants a WordPress one. Creates a design based on a theme.
This particular theme has a demo page.
And when running it through pagespeed insights returns a score Of 29.
Pingdom score of grade D.
Halfway through "development" we get a complaint from BPOS that the site is returning a score of 49 and a Pingdom score of grade B.
Considering how bad the theme is and how optimized we got. I believe that this was a miracle.
The things we do to make a living. -
So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.
After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).
Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.
Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.
Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).
I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.3 -
You know shit is going to hit the fan if the sentence "c++ is the same as java" is said because fuck all the underlying parts of software. It's all the fucking same. Oh and to write a newline in bash we don't use \n or so, we just put an empty echo in there. And fuck this #!/bin/bash line, I'm a teacher. I don't need to know how shit works to teach shit. Let's teach 'em you need stdio for printf even tho it compiles fine without on linux (wtf moment number one, asking em leaves you with "dunno..") and as someone who knows c you look at your terminal questioning everything you ever learned in your whole life. And then we let you look into the binaries with ldd and all the good stuff but we won't explain you why you can see a size difference in the compiled files even tho you included stdio in the second one, and all symbol tables show the exact same thing but dude chill, we don't know what's going on either.
Oh and btw don't use different directory names as we do in our examples. You won't find your own path, there is no tab key you can press to auto-fill shit.
But thats not everything. How about we fill a whole semester with "this is how to printf" but make you write a whole game with unity and c#. (not thaught even the slightest bit until then btw)
Now that you half-assed everything because we put you in a group full of fucks who don't even know what a compiler is but want to tell you you don't know shit and show you their non-working unfinished algorithms in some not-even-syntax-correct java...
...how about we finally go on with Algebra II: complex numbers, how they are going to fuck up your life, how we can do roots of negative numbers all of the sudden and let you do some probability shit no one ever fucking needs. BUT WHY DON'T YOU KNOW EVERYTHING ALREADY HMMMMM, IT'S YOUR SECOND LESSON, YOU WENT TO SCHOOL PLS BE A MATH PRO ASAP CUS YOU NEED IT SO MUCH BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW PROPER SYNTAX, HOW MEMORY MANAGEMENT WORKS, WHAT A REFERENCE IS AND PLS FINALLY FORGET THE WORD "ALLOCATION" IT DOESN'T PLAY A SINGLE ROLE YOU ARE STUDYING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT ECONOMICS IT MAKES NO SENSE I MEAN YOU HAD A WHOLE SEMESTER OF HOW TO GREET SOMEONE IN ENGLISH, MATHS > ECONOMICS > ENGLISH > FUCKING SHIT > CODING SKILL THATS HOW THE PRIORITIES WORK FOR US WHY DON'T YOU GET IT IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE BRAH4 -
I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.
They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.
If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.
The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.
Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.
They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.
PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.
Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.
Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.
The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.
You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.2 -
A shitty job is any job where there's a role "manual tester", defined as a person with no software development experience clicking about some application. That person/role is bad for health and will shorten your life. Stay away!2
-
Until today, I had assumed deploying stuff to prod would NOT be one of my responsabilities in this company. Apparently that's not the case.
Had to deploy my code and pray it didn't break anything. Why is this a big deal at all?
Well you see, there is no repository. At all. No git, no svn, not even duplicate folders. No tests, no pipeline. Just a bunch of CPanels.
Had to manually copy files and folders from the development site to the production site and partially copy a database. "Just drag and drop" were the instructions I was given.
As if using CakePHP2, PHP5 and having to parse fucking Excel files wasn't bad enough, now I have to deal with one of the worst ways to deploy code.
Fuck it, I'm switching on the looking-for-job flag on linkedin.5 -
Been interested in trying Polymer for a while so gave it a try today, two hours later now and about to dropkick my laptop!
Followed the "this-looks-super-easy-guide" but that kinda turned into shit when it was time to run gulp!
How the f#*k can it be so hard to find information and get this to work!
Guess I'll just stick with my Android development and forget about this side project because it affects my mood in a bad f#*king way👹5 -
Agile/Scrum is the worst project management style in software development.
Rather than focusing on delivering a feature or changes on the project, everyday there is always a meeting that you need to attend to, other than the daily huddle. And those meetings are none of your concern or why they needed you there
And my Product Owner and Scrum Master does not know even though how software development cycle works. When you discuss technical details or constraint to them, they either look confused or don’t know what to say and just say “If you need anything, always communicate or approach me” even you already told them the issue.
Or maybe we are doing it wrong. But it is been 5 years when they implement this Agile/Scrum and we are still bad at it.
Just ranting4 -
How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.
But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.
And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.
I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!
But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.5 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.
They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.
I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.
It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.
You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.
And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.
Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.
Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.9 -
Hello world,
at my current job at a "big company" our development process sucks, something is on fire at all times, there are hundreds of dependency issues, it's so bad that I'm struggling to find motivation.
Yet they pay me well.. Yaay for big companies that refuse to change when provided with feedback on how to improve things.4 -
Got my first job in a web development company. I am on a trial period, which means at the end of two weeks they will evaluate my performance and give me a full time contact. As a trial I am given task to work on internal CMS system. And OMG!! the coding is horrible. I think someone can start from scratch and redo the entire thing faster the adding new features to that piece of Hell!! Am worried after 2 weeks my performance is going to look bad.10
-
I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.
Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'? -
The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".
Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".
Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.
The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.
There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.
One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.
This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.
For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.
On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.
I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.
Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story. -
My family literally knows nothing about development, programming, computer science. It's bad. The closest anyone in my family has come to understanding is a distant cousin, who is an IT lead in Healthcare. His mother told him to call me because some fucking piece of shit at his job purposefully mucked up an internal ASP.net app on his way out. Sure, I had nothing better to do than to phone debug your shitty app with zero context. Great.
My wife is the one who comes closest to understanding in my immediate family* but even she admits when I come home ranting that she has absolutely zero idea what I'm saying.
It great though because I get to use her as a living rubber duck that just stares at me with a blank expression. Then at the end of describing a complex problem I'm trying to sort out she just replies with some encouraging thing like, "I'm certain you'll figure it out."
Fuck this is a long rant. Sorry. I better get back to work. -
Hi guys some advice would be appreciated.
I’m new here but have followed for a long time. I enjoy coding in my spare time, particularly web development but I am looking to make it my career.
Currently I work in mental health as a social worker, but ultimately the stress of the job and life in general has led to me being detained in a psychiatric hospital. So I’ve decided I need change.
I want to start a career I want to be in and that is as a developer. In terms of education, I started a degree in maths/cs a long time ago but stopped due to life events at the time. All the rest of my qualifications are around social work.
I’ve been doing my best to learn with Udemy and free code camp. Mainly looking at JavaScript. I also used to work in a charity where I did some (bad) php development and front end work.
Are there any self made developers out there who have any advice for me? I’m looking at doing a bootcamp but dunno if that will help at all.
Any help or advice would be really welcome. Cheers guys :)23 -
I hate web development, I didn’t study CS to make web sites, I like learning new things but when web development is involved and especially certain libraries and frameworks, it seems that I always have to learn again the same thing with a different flavor and I feel stuck in the same place… and at the end of the day it is always form this, validate that, download those AARGH!!
Maybe it is just a bad day6 -
(Part 1/2?)
Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.
Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.
So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.
THE INTERNSHALA ARC:
I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.
I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.
I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.
THE WHATSAPP ARC:
I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.
The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).
So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?
Him: So, which parts CAN you do?
I thought of it as an HR thing.
Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.
Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.
I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.
Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?
Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.
At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).
Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.
And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.3 -
How many sh*t days does it need to make me down?
3 ...
I hate my company, for making everything overcomplicated and annoying.... I have to discuss with 3 peoples for 3 days to getting some gitlab premium licenses (20$ per month for 10 licenses)... Why do you need it? Why we can't use the free version? Why Why Why... It's not enough to tell them it will save us much times and improves the quality of development.....
Also I wanted to ask if we can to Jaxb or another Dev Conference this year... Then I got the information that we have about 2000 Euro for 10 people for training.......... What should we do if everyone buys a book this budget is out .... f*ck company....
Second day, half of the day was taken for fixing the live db on the fly cause of a bad structure of tables... at least fixed some other inconsistence too... later the day fixed a freaking shitty bug with Spring Devtools and 2 Classloader to make the product that I'm presenting in 2 days running.
Today next shitty day with discussion that everything I did last half year (introducing Microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka and other DevOps things) could be maybe useless when the external company will say that they use another ecosystem -..- for their microservices...
Someone looking for a disappointed java developer? I just want to develop the best product ever... I'm happy with every area... Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Fullstack, Architect in some kinds depends on the wishes and technologies.1 -
Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.
Little backstory. Starts with a question.
What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?
Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.
Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.
Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.
I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.20 -
I need help.
I love software and hardware development but over a period of 4 years now i have lost motivation. I hardly finish anything i have started and if i finish, it's never rewarding.
I also feel like i live a very boring life. Staring at the screen all day and doing very little.
What do you guys do for fun? What activities or books do you read to keep yourselves busy or entertained?
I have been having this desire for someone to love but something makes me think that it's just a reaction to a soul that has lost purpose and only feels like loving someone will be a source of happiness. Luckily, nobody has been available for the mess i have been.
I really admire busy people. People who are passionately working on something they have chosen to do and still have fun.
I think talking to someone about how bad i feel about myself will help a little but what i really need is help on how to restore the motivation i had 4 years ago.
Can someone give me a fun project i can work on? Not for making money but something i will do, learn and feel happy about it.
I will also appreciate if someone can recommend a good book that will help me learn. Get me motivated and also hide me from this reality.
Thank you.1 -
I am not sure if this is the best place for it, but let's go:
I am 35 years old and I always worked in the localization industry. I really love to code and I always developed small tools and scripts to help me and others at work, but now the company is going bad and it has the chance to close.
I was reckon if it would be a good idea to give development a try, besides my age and the lack of experience in a real development place. I am not even sure if I use programming good practices, as I always developed by myself.
Do you have any opinion about it?
Thank you so much!4 -
When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.
Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.
When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.
Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!
Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?
When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:
1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.
Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).
Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.
When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:
(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".
Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.
There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".
It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?2 -
!rant
Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.
So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.
So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.
And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.
Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.
After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.
On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.
I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.
I am still finishing the app, though :)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.
I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.
Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.
Peace out folks. Good night... -
How can I ask my coworkers for feedback without coming off as insecure?
A year and a half ago I got my first job as a remote developer when I was 30. I've done web and IT related jobs before but not full time development. Everything was fine for the first 10 months and then I started getting negative reviews, that my productivity rate is much lower than the rest of the team. I felt really sad and stressed, which led to a minor breakdown, which led to my contract being changed from a full time employee to a contractor that gets paid by the (estimated) hour. After a bit of research, I found out that my productivity rate was low because I was the only developer following our "One test per pull request" policy, which was obviously cancelled at some point, but nobody informed me. I didn't bring this up to my boss because I didn't want to make my manager and coworkers look bad. Working as a contractor isn't so good because a lot of times my features are delayed because of external factors I can't control(code reviews, testers, tests randomly breaking). I want to find out if I'm a bad developer or if the company is trying to cut costs by taking advantage of my insecurity and inexperience.1 -
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/...
Yet another tool to "empower" management into thinking they are able to do in days what takes engineers years to accomplish.
All this is going to do is create technical debt for developers to consume when management is promoted for a "job well done".
Fuck.3 -
The fact that the latest Linux kernel added support for 32 bit systems to function past 2038 is one of the most baffling things I've ever seen in development history... Not saying it's a bad thing... But.... Why3
-
Started learning Android development in Kotlin.
My first impressions:
- Kotlin is good, but class syntax is not very appealing
- Overall it seems to be quite easy, at least the basic stuff
- Android Studio is a fucking memory hog, RIP my RAM
- As good IntelliJ is as bad is Android Studio somehow
- Emulator seems to be really advanced which I like8 -
You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.
And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.
He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.
He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him
He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.
You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.
I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.
I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.
The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .
He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.
You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.
I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .
Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.
I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”
I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.
You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.
I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread3 -
Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.
On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p
Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).
Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.
Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.
Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.
There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.
All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.1 -
I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.
For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".
but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)
One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.
Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.
It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.
See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........
W3 -
Four steps of professional development:
1. Simple and bad
2. Complicated and bad
3. Complicated and good
4. Simple and good
At CSS and frontend in general, I'm easy four, straight up. At architecture, I'm perhaps two in devops/docker/kubernetes/other crap and three at DB design. At electrical engineering and embedded stuff, I'm 1, no questions asked.
What are your rankings?1 -
Fucking fuck! How could I be so naive?
I just started my masters in Enterprise Software Development. It's basically the continuation of the CS BSc I finished this year. I don't consider myself a lazy and bad dev and I finished in the top 5-10% of the class - I say this not because I want to brag, I know I'm not the best, I know I have my defects, BUT I don't think that it's a good sign that all of us, my top graduate friends all full of hate and anger against this whole MSc after just a week. And... It's mostly one fucking egoistic teacher's fault.
Okay, all of us are working full time which is obviously tiring if you combine it with the university classes. But I still think I could manage this first week better, if I wouldn't fucking came to the same line of the faculty.
I deeply fucking hate that I've been naively thinking that the masters will be different after experiencing one of the worst teachers last year. It's fucking first week, and I can't change the specialization anymore, only give up. I wanted to fill up the void with some usefulness, but I just fucking messed it up.
This "beloved" teacher is from the industry, he has a lot of experience and started to teach recently. Which is not a problem, no! It should be a great thing by default. But the way he holds his courses is inaccaptable. I don't think I have the right to share everything, but the following stuff just grinds my gears... Like a fucking lot:
1) He brags about a lot of stuff. Like he made really good deals in the past. Why should we know, that he made a contract with a client for 20 million euros. Okay. Whatever. That doesn't help us, and I think that bragging makes him look like an egoistic scum.
2) I hate this one the most: he fucking says that we have a choice in the administrative stuff. He gives us some hope and offers the possibility to argument and come up with our own solutions for grading and etc. But oh boy, is this a false hope, a fake idea of free will. He already knows what the final solution will be and on what kind of decisions will we all "agree". He did this last year, he does it again. Fucking naiveness of mine...
3) Lastly, he decided, that we have to go to theatre with him, all of us. No exception. And I like the theatre. But only when it isn't forced. Why and how could you pair this up with the grade you give to your students? Because that's what he does.
FML. How can I already hate this? How can I already be fed up with all the stuff? Anyways, I'm signing the contract with the university tomorrow, so let the fun games begin... I know, I look like a whining little boy now, but I just fucking had to went it after this deep fried shit-day. I probably have to get some sleep, and everything's gonna be fine. Eventually, skipping classes might become necessary in order to bear all this shit.6 -
Dear Devs,
after a bunch of years of exp I thought I would start to write a blog / write articles about dev-things. Small helper articles we all know :)
So 2 questions:
1) What is a good way to start it? Can anyone write for Medium.com? Or make your own website? Wordpress (never used wordpress before btw).
2) I think my english is too bad or a professional article about development - so I would write them in my native language (German) and want to have them translated by a native speaker. Where to find such people without paying a hugh amount each article?8 -
Quick background:I'm am a student at a university in Alabama. I am also working full time and have a family.
My beginning C++ class was online and the teacher was...unique to say politely.
She would post lectures while she did some of the programming examples. That wasn't so bad, except she would cough frequently in the lecture(which wearing headphones would make me jump), and the tempo of her lecture would lull me to sleep after a hard day at work.
What was worse, she would post "projects" for us to do and tell us she would give a guideline in the code.
Well most times what was asked for in the project was topics we hadn't covered fully or she never explained well. Her "guide" was randomly saying a loop should be here and an if and an else should go here, but nothing else would be referenced.
Dropped her the first time, got a Day the second because I just could not follow her lecturing. I later took the class physically and with a different instructor and had the highest grade in the class.
I later had her for web development course and she wasn't as bad on assignments, but damn her coughing still hurt.2 -
Guys I'm very bad at staying focused on one thing.
For a bit, I've been learning web development, and I've been working on a page for myself. Past few days I haven't really done anything because I'm trying to actually fucking graduate high school and as of right now I am NOT graduating.
But today I was taking my calculus final and I ended up talking to the teacher for a bit. He said he has an older tablet that he's trying to turn into a type of wall mounted home automation system. I believe he said something about using essentially a minimal Linux install to do it.
That really got me thinking, because I had a fairly similar idea a while ago (not exactly home automation, but just using an old tablet as a small Linux device), but never put in any actual effort to get it done. Now with winter break coming up for me, I really want to try and work on it some.
So before I start doing a fuckton of research on this, has anyone here ever done something similar to an Android device? I'm not talking about using that Linux Deploy app or a chroot. I'm talking about basically removing the Android environment, taking it down to a base Linux install. I just want to know if anyone can steer me in the right direction to save me some time3 -
At my company we have half annual discussions between supervisor and employees for development and knowledge stuff.
End of last year I had a very emotional discussion for over half an hour as somebody with a year of experience on why my stuff can be considered under knowledge. He never yielded in the slightest and tried to push me down in every way.
The outcome also reflects on the payment and therefore I tried to argue that we would need a third party, like HR, to help, which was debated down as to me not being able to communicate.
This is just one of the bad things I have/had to deal with.
Sadly I am still at the company mostly for legal reasons...
Still don't know if it was the right thing to debate and not getting in touch with HR :/
Worst3 -
I find it funny that core software from major companies has such bad bugs or flaws. With large development teams and QA they still get through, yet a bug half as bad on a system for a customer developed by a small team, we get a roasting for it!1
-
Fuck FE development. Tweaking or adding some stuff is OK, but making the whole FE from zero is a pain for me. Vanilla JS is OK, but I need to use Angular, which I don't know how to use properly. Generally, right now I find FE as a big confusing mess... Why Angular? Because fuck React - it is even more confusing. I just can't keep all these things in my head... You want to add something? Fine, add a dependency, import, export it, import again, that shit does not work alone, so you import another shit... IDE says it's all good, look it's up and running! But you open the app and it's not even loading because of errors. Another module missed, ffs. IDE can't really save you here, sigh...
I am a BE dev, I am straight out bad at FE. I don't hate FE, but I hate that I am forced to do it and I need to do it fast, without having time for learning it.
Ughh... I feel somewhat better now :\ Now back to making there modules work...13 -
Continuation from last rant
Yay I got my first internship as a software-engineer!
Now the story how I got it.
For my bachelor’s degree I need to get a internship, after searching companies in and around my area I found a company that focusses on app development. I’ve got some experience in that, And really enjoyed it. Well I figured why not apply there right. After not hearing anything about it for a week I gave up hope until I got called by an unknown caller.
They saw my e-mail and wanted to talk with me. So Super excited we made an appointment for today. Not knowing what to expect I came there about 10 minutes early searching for a receptionist or something. But they didn’t have one… then I just asked a random employee. He offered me a coffee and I waited a while. Until one of the senior developers brought me to the big boss of the company and the interview begun.
First they asked my about myself and what I do besides my study, once they had a good idea who I am they explained a bit about their products and how they developed them. Then the scary part started… They wanted to see my skills, And I hadn’t done anything with apps in a year. I showed them some code I wrote a year ago hoping it wasn’t as bad as I thought. So while feeling super uneasy about that they asked me on what skill level I thought I was. I told them I’d manage myself after a summer focusing on app development and they accepted me as a future intern.
Next week I get shown around the code base. And I start after the summer break.
Updates come when something interesting happens :D3 -
Context: This team has been constantly behind on deliveries, ignoring advice from other teams or more experienced colleague, making mistake after mistake and now, just revealed they have major performance issues, as warned...
So, in the most recent Sprint review they were, once again, criticized for their bad approach and inability as a team to receive feedback and work on that feedback, resulting in mediocre development...
As I left the room I heard one of them say:
"We make this huge rocket that most wouldn't be capable of doing and they cry that it's blue and not green... Others make a ls on a command line and everybody applauds"
Now, this is for everyone to whom the shoe fits...
Listen here you little entitled snotty prick, where do you think you are!? Yes most should not make a rocket when the requirement was a bike! That's overengineering and besides that most of your decisions were arguably wrong!
I will never applaud you or anyone else for doing your fucking job and being mediocre about it... What we applaud is value added! Value to the project, to the process or to the team... Bring value and I will applaud, do your job and you get a salary. Be a snotty childish dipshit and you might find yourself forcefully searching for new professional challenge! -
Impostor syndrome is too real. I frequent feel stress about tasks that are getting delayed. Saying yes to any task given to me (even if there isn't really time for it).
Most recent I had a 1 man project (which I hate, cause I always think it's better to work in teams). It was estimated to take 1 week and ended up being done 2½ weeks after. Remembered I took 1 sick day, just feeling awfull about the project being so delayed and couldn't get my self to go to work.
Well week after the project was done, I had a "employee development conversation" with my CEO and my boss. (like I do every half year). As always they loved to have me on the team and thought I was doing a great job. Same thing I always hear to these meetings.
Deep inside I know I am doing a good job. Keeping up with new things. But my problem is always taking to much on my plate. In the middle of all the code and stuff, I always seem to forget that I am doing a good job and doing my best and start feeling worse again. It's a really bad cycle and causing me to take "fake" sick days just to cool down again. (which often makes me feel even worse, for letting the project getting delayed more).
// DevRant / DevConfession2 -
After learning a bit about alife I was able to write
another one. It took some false starts
to understand the problem, but afterward I was able to refactor the problem into a sort of alife that measured and carefully tweaked various variables in the simulator, as the algorithm
explored the paramater space. After a few hours of letting the thing run, it successfully returned a remainder of zero on 41.4% of semiprimes tested.
This is the bad boy right here:
tracks[14]
[15, 2731, 52, 144, 41.4]
As they say, "he ain't there yet, but he got the spirit."
A 'track' here is just a collection of critical values and a fitness score that was found given a few million runs. These variables are used as input to a factoring algorithm, attempting to factor
any number you give it. These parameters tune or configure the algorithm to try slightly different things. After some trial runs, the results are stored in the last entry in the list, and the whole process is repeated with slightly different numbers, ones that have been modified
and mutated so we can explore the space of possible parameters.
Naturally this is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the critical thing is that for each configuration of numbers representing a track (and its results), I chose the lowest fitness of three runs.
Meaning hypothetically theres room for improvement with a tweak of the core algorithm, or even modifications or mutations to the
track variables. I have no clue if this scales up to very large semiprime products, so that would be one of the next steps to test.
Fitness also doesn't account for return speed. Some of these may have a lower overall fitness, but might in fact have a lower basis
(the value of 'i' that needs to be found in order for the algorithm to return rem%a == 0) for correctly factoring a semiprime.
The key thing here is that because all the entries generated here are dependent on in an outer loop that specifies [i] must never be greater than a/4 (for whatever the lowest factor generated in this run is), we can potentially push down the value of i further with some modification.
The entire exercise took 2.1735 billion iterations (3-4 hours, wasn't paying attention) to find this particular configuration of variables for the current algorithm, but as before, I suspect I can probably push the fitness value (percentage of semiprimes covered) higher, either with a few
additional parameters, or a modification of the algorithm itself (with a necessary rerun to find another track of equivalent or greater fitness).
I'm starting to bump up to the limit of my resources, I keep hitting the ceiling in my RAD-style write->test->repeat development loop.
I'm primarily using the limited number of identities I know, my gut intuition, combine with looking at the numbers themselves, to deduce relationships as I improve these and other algorithms, instead of relying strictly on memorizing identities like most mathematicians do.
I'm thinking if I want to keep that rapid write->eval loop I'm gonna have to upgrade, or go to a server environment to keep things snappy.
I did find that "jiggling" the parameters after each trial helped to explore the parameter
space better, so I wrote some methods to do just that. But what I wouldn't mind doing
is taking this a bit of a step further, and writing some code to optimize the variables
of the jiggle method itself, by automating the observation of real-time track fitness,
and discarding those changes that lead to the system tending to find tracks with lower fitness.
I'd also like to break up the entire regime into a training vs test set, but for now
the results are pretty promising.
I knew if I kept researching I'd likely find extensions like this. Of course tested on
billions of semiprimes, instead of simply millions, or tested on very large semiprimes, the
effect might disappear, though the more i've tested, and the larger the numbers I've given it,
the more the effect has become prevalent.
Hitko suggested in the earlier thread, based on a simplification, that the original algorithm
was a tautology, but something told me for a change that I got one correct. Without that initial challenge I might have chalked this up to another false start instead of pushing through and making further breakthroughs.
I'd also like to thank all those who followed along, helped, or cheered on the madness:
In no particular order ,demolishun, scor, root, iiii, karlisk, netikras, fast-nop, hazarth, chonky-quiche, Midnight-shcode, nanobot, c0d4, jilano, kescherrant, electrineer, nomad,
vintprox, sariel, lensflare, jeeper.
The original write up for the ideas behind the concept can be found at:
https://devrant.com/rants/7650612/...
If I left your name out, you better speak up, theres only so many invitations to the orgy.
Firecode already says we're past max capacity!5 -
Quick question, is it bad to quit from a job when the project is not finished yet, especially in a startup company?
My reasoning for quitting, boss doesn’t really understand how game development usually works and mostly assuming every project will be same.
Following is my rant of background story for my question.
The incident triggered me wanting to leave is as below.
G = another guy from incubating center
B = boss
G: hey B, do u know this game studio is releasing this title soon. It’s a local company. Sounds cool.
Then they went to check the company profile. Found that the company has abt 40 staffs in total.
B: hey lunadev, do u know them? They have 40 people to make 2 titles. I think we’re the smallest company in the world that developing mobile games. Ha ha ha.
Me: oh, may be their project scope is complex. But I don’t think ours is the smallest company in the world making game. (We have 5 in total including him) there are others with only 2 ppl making games. (My sarcastic side took over me and said) I think we’re the only company in the world that has such small manpower with shortest deadline.
B: then how long do u think our timeline should be?
Me: abt 2 yrs? (Me considering all the artworks, features, testing time that we have to do)
B: urmmm I don’t think it’s that long. May be abt 6 months or a year at most?
G: ya, abt 6 months. Mobile games are not like desktop games or others so should be abt 6 months. Shouldn’t take that long.
Me: ... :)
Then I packed up my stuffs and left for the day. As for side note, boss designed the game himself and it took him 5 years to add complex features. And sometimes he will still come up to us and ask us to add that feature just cuz he was just inspired by another game he just played. Now can they tell us, this game can finish in 6 months? On what ground?
And another thing that he does gets on my nerve is that he plays game during office hours while the rest of us rushing for his project and campaign.
So, if I quit now, they’d still be in the middle of development. Oh and I’m the main programmer developing the game. So, erm.. Is it wrong?7 -
I'd be interested to hear what are some bad development practices you've ran into in your company?13
-
Sooo TIL:
Running software that is still in development and it uses realtime jackd is a REALLY BAD IDEA. I could not even kill the damn thing! Thankfully shutdown -r now worked...1 -
I feel super discouraged. I just got a new job from being let go from my previous one, and I’m already thinking about quitting.
They really threw me into the weeds with a couple of complex tasks that require a lot of BE work and all I really do is FE. I’m still just trying to learn how the framework actually works. I think they expect me to become full stack. Now I find myself just starting at the computer screen most of the day because I have no fucking idea how to start working. The codebase and local environment is also fucked up super bad and barely runs on my machine.
Also, whenever I reach out these people they give the most minimal answers and have swollen egos. The frameworks they use have a really shitty community and bad documentation, so googling anything is really pointless. Working on this project, it has made me consider giving up development.
I am wondering if this is just a me thing though. Should I quit or stick with it for a bit?13 -
Yes WP sites can be bad.
But as bad as it can be, just as easy it can serve as a good kickstarter for the next website.
If just the developer behind said website has some kind of dignity about the code they produce and respect for their fucking job!
1. Don't use bloated plugins.
2. Always vheck out alternatives.
3. Don't ever use paid plugins/themes... just don't.
I for one, whenever installing a plugin, if said plugin generates any kind of unexpected output such as a notice it's an immidiate uninstall, and then rolling my own.
I also use a bare minimum boilerplate theme which does not bundle any frameworks, additional libaries or other kinds of that bloatware for all my wp sites, this ensures that every site is somewhay unique.
I've seen so many "devs" being lazy as fuck, using the wrong themes/plugins to "code" the site.
No! using page builders such as visual composer or bloatware slideshows does not count as good tools.
If you buy a theme from themeforest thinking it will save you hours of custom development, then fuck you... go drown in acid.. because guess fucking what?
It will save you absolutely jack shit in the long run..
Anything stating otherwhise is marketing bullcrap4 -
Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.
At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!
Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).
The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)
Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.
Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.
Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!
I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95. -
Well here I go my first rant.
A little bit of background:
So I started working my first job a little over a month ago. found devrant about a week in. I was lucky that at a very young age I found programming and liked it (about 6 or 7). I went to college just to get a degree (bachelors of game development).
The job that was a "Great" opportunity that would be bad to let slip by (not a game dev job sadly). Well during the interview they asked me simple thing like what programming languages I know and some simple stuff like that, they never did ask me to demonstrate my knowledge though. Then they went to the weirder questions.
Do you know SQL? yeah at a very base level.
Do you know Excel? I mean I used is a bit, but not very much.
Etc.
A few of the questions felt a little out of place for the field, But it was the only "programming job" that would hire an experienced junior developer, so I took it. Guess I should have asked more questions.
Now I'm here at a job to help replace someone who is retiring. He wasn't a programmer really, but he wrote some code out of necessity well his platform of choice was VBA in Excel. Oh, and that's not the best part, he also dealt with mistakes that happen in the lab (electronics shit). So when ever there is a fuck up I have to go figure out how to search a poorly designed database (that is constantly changing), and today is the day he leaves, so no more help after today. My biggest fear currently is that I wont be able to fill a request that someone makes and I'll be the reason the company is losing money. And with all the stress/burn out that's building up I haven't been working on personal projects, which being my main source of entertainment might be making me depressed. Even when I do work up the effort to work on my projects I don't get very much entertainment. (If anyone has a suggestion for this that would be helpful.)
TIL: Even if the job is a great opportunity don't stop searching and ask a lot of questions.2 -
When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?
Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.
1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")
2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.
3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.
4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.
---
That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.
The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.
Here is the question (finally!)
Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*
Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.
If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.
The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.
I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.
Thanks5 -
Best choice: not going into game development. Bad payment for horrible working conditions.
Worst choice: telling numbers as first party in the interview process for every job I had so far. Made me earn far under my market value.4 -
I understand the reasoning behind switching to a new, maybe better, technology, but for fuck sake, it’s against typical Microsoft strategy to “kill and shoot to the dead corpse” something instead of maintaining backward compatibility. Why they’ve changed?
I still can develop VB6 software for Windows 11 that just works. But you removing newer tools for no reason.
In short: Xamarin is dead, and that’s alright, but they are even deciding to “remove” development tools from future updates of VS 2022. Why?? Keep it optional, allow me to write legacy code (just 4 years old actually) a bit longer. 🙃
And also, .NET MAUI doesn’t seem “great”, at least at the first sight.
Why you’re forcing me to switch to it if there are 0 benefit for my product?
It’s so bad the only way to bring developers is this one?!
What is incredible to me is that the “industry field”, which is HUGE is so often ignored because of the “customers field”. Keep them separated. If you don’t want to support old tools, just don’t, but leave them there.
They killed Windows Mobile 6.5 which was old but still alive and fine in the industries, you had the biggest market share in PDAs and decided to give it to fucking Google.
The manufacturers kept selling WM devices even in 2020… and they stopped just because you stopped selling licenses.
You acquired Xamarin, gave everyone for free the tools to keep writing .NET for Android and move the industry apps, and now you are saying “actually fuck you, do it again, even though nothing really changes, but convert your entire project to this bs we’ve created”. Why???
Microsoft response: it’s just a few clicks and everything works fine.
My response: No, it’s not… the entire UI is rendered in a different way, I have to rewrite the whole UI of my app and a lot of modules stopped working because of nuget packages I can’t install anymore…
I have to spend additional time to make it work THE SAME as before, not better. So what’s the fucking point?17 -
So this is the story of myself getting from hating vim to find it pretty good.
When i started fiddling around with linux i was literally overrun by vim. I mean how the fuck should i remember all these stupid commands.
So there we go ... nano was my favourite (and only) editor i used.
Everything was fine in my little nano world. I saw some colleague editing every damn thing in vim. I asked him "man what the fuck are you damn crazy"? And thats where till that moment the deepest conversation about an editor in my life began. He told me he could do that much with vim, its almost everywhere nowadays and a must for any admin.
So after letting him tell me about every thing you can do he promised me he is going to help me getting started quicker. And i must say boi vim is really awesome. But for "real" development i still use a ide. Although i find myself programming go, python or bash scripts entirely in vim and its not that bad.
So if you find your way through the deep shit of that single damn command input down there you can get a pretty decent editor.
Dont get me wrong i am forced to use nano sometimes, when i help some of friends with their servers or so and they litterally uninstalled vim because they were to frustrated.
So as i am started to go into the devops area you get more and more towards you have to edit a file on a server, or just tweak around before automating the shit out of it.
And i must say vim has become a solid alternative for me to a full blown ide, or any other text editor.
So yeah i am gone from freaking hating vim to using it almost everyday. But why some people out their treat vim like a religion is not understandable to me in any way.
So whats your story why do you hate/love vim? Or are you just like me a "happy user" that would switch to another editor anytime it would be a better fit?3 -
I'm a self-taught frontend developer with 1,5 - 2 years of experience in JavaScript / Vue.js development. Pretty cliche in 2023 and I can actually feel this now when it comes to the job market. It's brutal at the moment.I moved to Germany for a specific job but got laid off a few weeks ago due to a lack of projects and actual things to do. And here I am right now: tons of job applications, 4-5 interviews a week, zero success.
I'm thinking about getting some warehouse job or anything for the time being, and start freelancing in my spare time. Instead of this oversaturated JavaScript landscape, I would get into PHP (not as "hip" so less competition, backend, no new tools every 6 months), SQL, or hyper-specialize in CSS - something I like quite a bit but have seemingly zero value to employers.
I actually made a simple website for a small business when I was getting started with frontend, and he was super happy with the end result. I also did some language tutoring, that was quite rewarding as well. So freelancing is definitely fun, I enjoyed it much more than fearing layoffs or trying to force a fake-ambitious attitude on my 30th interview that most probably won't lead me anywhere. :D
Is the frontend job market really this oversaturated? (I know, I know... It's not difficult for competent, skilled, and experienced devs with CS degrees) Is being a CSS specialist, PHP-developer, or SQL-magician on fiverr/upwork/etc. a viable freelancing path? I've heard good and bad about these platforms, the competition there, etc. If not, where should I start?
What do you think? Any input is much appreciated. :)4 -
So I started my new job yesterday. My manager seems like a nice person & co-workers too.
Meanwhile I found out they use Eclipse and SVN. I've been learning and using git. Now gotta learn subversion. Oh and all Java development I did was on Netbeans.
I'm learning Swift (3) and I saw few projects in objective-C.
Man they must really be seeing something in me.
I'm hoping Eclipse and SVN isn't as bad. Reading rants here makes it seem pretty bad lol.
I'm excited to learn though, gotta dive right in.3 -
Just had my first lesson of the course Web Development. We got an explanation of what html, css, js and php are. Nothing bad ever happened from repeating what you already know, so yeah..
But then came the horror: We need to make a website in FUCKING WORDPRESS!! I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO BUILD A FUCKING WEBSITE WITHOUT A FUCKING SHIT CMS!!
So I showed the teacher my personal website and asked if I could use and/or extend that. They loved it, but I still need to build a website using fucking wordpress!! Not even using php! No, we need to build it with the UI of wordpress.
I know that's not even hard. It's just.. WORDPRESS!!
I guess I'll just have to live with it :/2 -
After 1.5y in this company with literally 0 growth, I'm most likely about to change job and earn a bit more.
I'm switching from frontend development to XR development.
I already worked with it and I know it's gonna be bad, but I really need that extra money (about +250€/month14 -
Soooo I am an apprentice who just started his third year. Everybody in my team (3 ppl) left for better jobs.
I am now basically front and backend lead, teaching four new employees our restapi, web and javafx frontend.
At the same time I fix errors happening in production and develop new features.
I guess there are many great rants to come, so stay tuned :D
Going to write about things like tests that got disabled months ago after migrating to gradle, no documentation, finding out how to set up new development workstations with an outdated script missing important steps, management, print debugging in production and much more :)
Oh and it is not that bad, I learned more in the last month than in the two years before. (not saying my team was bad)1 -
I got contacted by an other company and I am so unsure whether to accept their offer or stay at my current job.
For now I spend 2 years at my current company. The culture is great and everyone gets treated very well.
The bad part is, that it is located in a part of Germany I really can't stand and to this day fully remote is not an option.
Additionally lots of stuff is really frustrating in my daily work, e.g. colleagues that experiment with critical parts if our infrastructure, resulting in every developer who made the mistake to update the local development stack being unable to work for half a day or so.
This and the fact, that our techstack sucks hard. (mostly bad php for backend and server-rendered HTML and a weird mix of Typescript, Javascript, Vue and some old bits of deprecated angular for frontend). This company has it's own product (a web platform) and no real deadlines in the sense of "something bad happens, when your team won't achieve the project in the originally proposed time"
Company number two seems to work with a wide variety of technologies for very different projects (it's a consulting compan), would pay me ~28% more than my currently raised pay and allows for full remote.
When I try to look objectively on the facts everything points to accepting their offer, but on the other hand there is this weird feeling of this being a joice that would come to soon...
How do you make such decisions? I already talked to a great colleague of mine, who thinks it might not be a bad idea to stay at the company for an additional year or 2, because I haven't yet reached the point where there is not enough to learn here anymore, which I agree on, but this company seems to offer everything I want.
I feel overwhelmed with this situation :D that's why I would like to know how you people try to tackle such a situation8 -
when the senior doesn't bother reading the issue you've discovered which is a legitimate issue and other team members encounter after pulling develop
instead they prescribe not helpful advice of resetting your entire development environment, which would've wasted time, effort and not been the most efficient way to fix the issue
thankfully you have the sense not to reset your entire environment
they then proceed to gaslight you
of course at the end of the day they dont acknowledge or can possibly fathom they fucked up and gave bad advice
looking for tips on how to be so zen you dont choose anger and how to reduce stress2 -
Two years ago my laptop crashed and wouldn't boot windows anymore. Luckily I had already handed in all small projects and backed up the rest. However, I still had to install all my programs on a fresh new windows installation.
I decided to give Linux a try since it was an old laptop and I have to say that my data loss situation was not bad at all but getting into solving Linux errors can take quite some time out of your day, especially in the beginning. After a week of spending time here and there to improve the situation I had pretty much everything setup to the point where I could start development again. I have to say that it has changed my workflow and that I'm loving Linux now. I started out with Ubuntu and now I'm trying out some other distros on my second laptop (if you got any suggestions please let me know).
I still use windows side by side with Linux for certain tasks, but I'm not regretting losing my windows installation on my laptop. It made me realize that there's much more out there to learn and to give a try.3 -
Worst dev disaster?
Welp, my now 6 year old Mac keeps sending signal to my monitors that in my experience regardless of OS generally says "my video card is gonna fuckin die soon".
I've re-installed the Windows partition like 3 times, but that responds to the video card problems so bad it pretty much just BSODs... but the Mac side soldiers on, just occasionally having weird visual glitches. Thats fine, I work on the Mac side.
And I don't really want to spend a shit ton on a new computer... but I do want a Mac, so I'm gonna spend a shit ton.
So now I have to decide if I can hold out for an M1 or if I should just shell like thousands for a Mac that will be out of date in like 4 months. After which for development purposes I'd still have to buy at least the M1 dev kit Mac Mini.
All of which hinges on this effing video card lasting another few months.
Because if it doesn't I'm going to have to use my kids 8GB fuckin HP laptop as my main dev machine while I get another Mac in the mail and that would fucking suck not to mention the like minimum two days sleep I'd lose just setting up the required local environments I'd need... not to mention I'd have to do all that in Windows... so I'd have to find Windows equivalents for all my dev tools. Or fuck it, maybe I could just install Putty and server cowboy everything... but it would still suck.
And, of course, I don't have time to do any of that because I have the normal like 2 tight deadlines on shit.
The next few months of my life, potentially my ability to earn a living, potentially my sanity...
Hangs on the health of a fucking six year old heavily abused video card.9 -
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... -
ok. i am not a professional dev. today i am at a workshop to learn about a new software for my profession. instead of concentrating about the functions all i can do is to bother about bad ui and ux and the bad excuses from the developer why this and that doesn't work. seems to be quite a hasty development.
-
About 3 years ago, we had 4 different WordPress sites for various clients.
My colleagues thought it'd be a genius idea to keep them all in one repo. Even more genius, for local development, a single installation which implements a switcher for the wp-config.php files so we can switch between sites. Not bad in theory.
Fast-forward to present day. 1 client left; another site got converted to using Laravel because they always asked us to update their content so no point using a CMS; whereas the remaining 2 sites use differing versions of WordPress on their live sites, no less than 18 months out of date, have no dev sites, different collection of plugins and themes and both modified to the deepest darkest depths of fucking hell that's barely recognisable as WordPress anymore and next to no documentation or comments around the changes.
The functions.php file of one of these themes is over 4000 lines long!!!
We're keen to upgrade our servers to use Ubuntu 16.04 which defaults to PHP7, so all the already deprecated WordPress functions will then fail to work completely as will have been removed.
Both of these clients have agreed that they wish to convert Laravel as well so there's not really much point in going through the clean up process of their WordPress sites. Just copy the database nuke it all and start a fresh with Laravel FFS!
They also wish to completely redesign and discuss what features to keep/add/remove. With no date for these redesign meetings in sight, we won't be converting to Laravel any time soon, nor upgrading our servers in the foreseeable future either!
This is all because of one dev in the office and his history of failing to keep on top of breaking changes!
Fuck you! Seriously, fuck you!!!
If I was your superior, then you'd have been fired long ago!3 -
!rant
I'm a designer and just found out about a hackathon by Deutsche Bank hosted at the end of October in Berlin. Are some devs out there interested in forming a team (and brainstorming about an idea, obviously)? Preferably from around Germany, since one has to pay travel costs on his/her own, but I'm open, really.
More information: https://api-open.db.com
Just hit me up if you're interested!
P.S. I'm not bad at getting some front-end development done...8 -
>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met
I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?6 -
The production file edited in March was way more advanced than the development file edited in July... what happened here?
I want to implement Git on this one so bad. :( I wish I found the way and the time already (it's a very complicated situation).10 -
I am the technical lead in a project which uses a C# based framework. It's a lot of drag and drop, and C# scripts can be embedded for fancy stuff.
Scripts in general are not hard to do, it's harder to understand the business rules rather than the code itself.
I got hired as a junior to build this project from scratch as an MVP, and we need another junior to add enhancements and minor changes required from our end users. Since management wants me to move on working on more mid-senior development stuff, I'm supposed to be only supervising the juniors work (in the hopes that one day they'll be able to work on their own).
We've had bad luck filling this position. Our last hire is a guy like 17 years older than me, supposedly with experience in said framework but OH DEAR GOD.
Fucktard can't understand requirements and corrections, isn't able to deliver a 20 line script without fucking up. I give him a list with 3 mistakes to fix and only fixes two, crap like that.
Now, hear me out, the mistakes are stuff like:
- Unused variables
- Confusing error messages
- Error messages written in spanglish (mix between Spanish and English, we're located in Latin America)
- Untested features, this is the worst of all.
You may say "but he's a junior", sure. But as I said, he supposedly has experience, more years in IT than me, and fine, you're allowed to fuck up a few times on your first tasks but not make the same mistakes over and over, specially since we've already sat down and addressed these issues in presence of the CTO.
Fuck this guy. I genuinely dislike him as a person also, he is from another latin country and we have some serious cultural differences. For instance, he insists on sucking your ass constantly, being overly well manered (we already saluted with the whole team at the daily stand up, stop saying hello, good day, regards in each of your fucking chat messages or task submissions), and other mannerisms that are hard to translate, but whatever, all of these attitudes are frowned upon here. They're not necessary, we just want to keep it simple, cordial and casual and see you deliver the crap that you're being paid for with a decent level of quality.
On Monday the CTO comes back from vacation, I'm looking forward to that meeting, gonna report his ass, there is evidence everywhere on our issue tracker.4 -
Swift.
First, they added features that no developer understand : what the fuck is an optional value ?
And the documentation for iOS development is horrible. It took me 5 days to understand how the fuck we can make a POST HTTP Request with this fucking bad framework.3 -
Today I deeply understood/learned that if anything complex has to be built, tested and maintained by a single person the most important factor to don't go crazy is the concepts of "separation of concern".
Even though it makes the development slower (*) and quite some times boring it gives back in almost absence of uncertainty and because of repetitive patterns also ease on going back to work on a new/old part/feature.
(*) Because of planning and organisation of the code flows and layers flows, but also compartmentalization of actions (a bad example would be the mix of validation code with CRUD code)
How do you experience the separation of concern? (If you have ever had the chance)
Ps: still earning ~1400€/m, am I worth more? 🤔4