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."

Best practice!

Best practice.

I'm a little late to this, but that Python master/slave issue.. what the fuck is up with that?!

You say that you're offended by words.
=> Fuck off. If you want to serve social justice, help people in third-world countries that need your help.
=> Also, you do realize that the use of master/slave is just as much applicable to technology as client/server or host/guest are, right? It's a relationship between fucking machines or code blocks, not humans.

You say "why the outrage over this?"
=> Fuck off. Your SJW bullshit has no place in technology. It's a fucking word in fucking code!!!

You say that you're improving the Python project with this.
=> Fuck off. It breaks existing documentation and needlessly abstracts terminology that is used pretty much everywhere. What do you prefer, conciseness and a language to be easy to understand or for it to become all cushioned to soothe your frail feelings?

You know, there's something else that I wanted to talk about that's related to this. I have Asperger Syndrome, which on paper is a disability. In practice it's difficulty to socialize while having an above average IQ. That "disability" is what drove me into technology. When I see job listings actively prefer people with disabilities for social justice, you know what? That offends ME. Because I wouldn't want to be chosen as the best applicant just because it ticks social justice boxes. I want to be chosen as the best applicant because I outcompeted every other applicant with actual skill and fitness to do my job.

Also, when a company sells you a defective unit, would you be happy? Of course not. So why are you happy when they employ a defective? I am someone that would - on paper - be impeded by natural selection, because I am "handicapped". But I'm all for it. Humanity is what it is today - shit - partly because defectives have become widely accepted into society. Call me a bigot, but I'd rather be called that than to not raise concerns about this trend.

On the subject of handicaps, that's a term that's used in games, what for aiding the player that can't win against the regular opponent (which is usually just a fucking bot, wtf yo). I am handicapped, therefore YOU shouldn't use the word in a sense where it's totally reasonable to use it!! Says no one ever, me neither. Grow a fucking pair and realize that code isn't written with the intent to offend anyone. So why are you?

Here's my piece of advice for new devs out there:

1 - Pick one language to learn first and stick with it, untill you grasp some solid fundamentals. (Variables, functions, classes, namespaces, scope, at least)

2 - Pick an IDE, and stick with it for now. Don't worry about tools yet. Comment everything you're coding. The important thing is to comment why you wrote it, and not what it does. Research git and start using version control, even when coding by yourself alone.

3 - Practice, pratice and pratice. If you got stuck, try reading the language docs first and see if you can figure it out yourself. If all else fails, then go to google and stackoverflow. Avoid copying the solution, type it all and try to understand it.

4 - After you feel you need to go to the next level, research best practices first, and start to apply them to your code. Try to make it modular as it grows. Then learn about tools, preprocessors and frameworks.

5 - Always keep studying. Never give up. We all feel that we have no idea of what we are doing sometimes. That's normal. You will understand eventually. ALWAYS KEEP STUDYING.

Gotta separate those concerns properly y'all.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!

Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.

What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.

I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.

To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.

tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.

Ranted about him before. The to the max windows fanboy. But next to being that, he had the habit of shooting down any and every idea/suggestion etc I had. Which is still quite 'fine' if you come up with good alternatives but he only came up with his own fucking preferences. (thing to keep in mind is that he wasn't even on our (me and one other guy) projects (!!!))

It would always go like this:

Him: soo, how are you planning on doing this?
Me: well I was thinking about {insert idea}.
Him: *wtf face* why?!?
Me: *comes up with constructive arguments*
Him: well, it's non of my business as I'm not on the project...... Buuuuuuut I'd do it with this: {insert anything in relation to Microsoft and the stack i said}.

It's bearable if that happens once.
It's annoying to fucking death when you hear that 10+ FUCKING TIMES EVERY DAY.

Every time I ended up completely boiling inside and getting the best possible practice at self-control. I never snapped even once.

When he finished his internship I talked to a colleague that he had to partner up with after a week or two to ask what he thought about that guy.
His reaction: he's a fucking disrespectful lowlife and a cunt. He was veeeeeeeeeery annoying with me and always shooting down my ideas but danm he was nearly fucking bullying/intimidating you every fucking day! He makes me fucking sick.

Turn 21 today and give me self a day to work only on side projects, so happy ☺

To all the design pattern nazis..

Don't you ever tell me that something is impossible because it violates some design pattern! Those design principles are there to make your life easier, not something you have to obey by law.
Don't get me wrong, you should where ever possible respect those best practices, because it keeps your software maintainable.
But your software should foremost solve real world problems and real world problems can be far more complex than any design pattern could address. So there are cases where you can consciously decide to disregard a best practice in order to provide value to the world.

Thanks for reading if you got this far.

My boss: it hasn't been done yet?
Me: I'm not sure about the way to do it...
My boss: It is THAT tricky?
Me: no, I know a bunch of ways to do it, but is there a better one...

Whenever I feel bad, I go and help random people with their code.

I also randomly offer to help teach people Java so that they can learn best practice and perhaps not make the same small mistakes.

Such is life. My method of coping with sadness.

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

Pretty new at the job still.

-”Hey, best practice to do X?”

”Just check how we did it in previous code”

*checks whole bloody project, everything done in 500 different ways by 20 people*
*selects what seems as the best solution already used*

”Ya, you should have done X like this instead”

😒

Proud of this. When you print my blog it is what every website should be: a clean document.

What kind of cum gargling gerbil shelfer stores and transmits user passwords in plain text, as well as displays them in the clear, Everywhere!

This, alongside other numerous punishable by death, basic data and user handling flaws clearly indicate this fucking simpleton who is "more certified than you" clearly doesn't give a flying fuck about any kind of best practice that if the extra time was taken to implement, might not totally annihilate the company in lawsuits when several big companies gang up to shower rape us with lawsuits over data breaches.

Even better than that is the login fields don't even differentiate between uppercase or lowercase, I mean WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DO YOU SELF RIGHTEOUS IGNORANT CUNTS THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THIS SCENARIO?

One stored procedure for each page

That’s the “best practice for performance”

TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤

I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.

He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.

After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.

Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.

He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.

Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.

This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.

!dev at all

Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.

While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.

My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."

I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"

"But i get all anxious and shit"

"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"

Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.

So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.

Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.

"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"

"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"

"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!

"Ok, but only if its you"

Daaaaaaaaaamn

Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.

Lord knows I had my fun with them.

So I watched this video that tries to convince people, that the jQuery library isn't really best practice anymore and showed how you can achieve basic tasks with vanilla JS, aswell as some frameworks (Vue, React, Angualar) and how they handle interactions with the DOM.

It also talked about how nearly every JS question on SO has top answers using jQuery, and how that's a bad thing.

But what I found in the comment section of this video was pure horror: So-called "Developers" defending jQuery to the death. Of course there were some people who made some viable arguments (legacy code, quick & dirty projects), but the overwhelming majority were people making absurd claims and they seemed quit self-confident.

GOSH!

Want an example?
Look:

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

Best time to learn something new?
-Now

Best way to learn something new?
-By doing it. Practice makes perfect.

I wasted so much time and never got anywhere because I wanted to get it right. Fucking up is part of the learning process.

What is considered best practice for code indentation? When I'm working with HTML and Javascript my rule of thumb is 2 spaces for indentation, and with Java and Python it's 4 spaces.

Also I'm trying to break my bad habit of mixing tabs and spaces. It's messing with the laws of physics.

Best practice of the day:
Single responsibility principle - One class should be responsible for everything!

Either that or someone was payed for LoC. 😁

during code review...
peer: "you should pass this variable, and extract the logger from it"
me: "why? it is a 3 line logging function. why not pass the logger instance?"
peer: "because that is our best practice. It is the way we do things"
me: "why is it a best practice?"
peer: "because it is. We use it everywhere!"
me: "No we don't. And I still don't understand why is this a best practice. can you explain?"
peer: gives ups, did not look at the mr, and was not going to.

mr stays open. probably forever.

Best Practice: variables with meaningful names.
Me: variables named after stuff from the Marvel universe.
End result: Debugging after 6 months. WTF is mjolnir6 ???

One of our senior dev enjoys berating the other devs because they don't check-in code according to his schedule (once a day, once an hour..he flip-flops a lot), then when they do, he 'reviews' their code, beating them up because of incomplete features, commented out code..petty..petty nonsense.
Ex. (this occurred couple of weeks ago).

Ralph: "The button click code in this event isn't complete"
Dev: "No, its not, the code in my development branch. You said it was best practice to check in code daily whether the code worked or not. I didn't finish the event last night and ..."
Ralph: "Exactly. Before you check any code into source control, it has to work and be 100% complete. What if someone moved that code into production? What happens if that code got deployed? I'm not even going talk about the lack of unit tests."
Dev: "Uh..well..the code is on the development channel, and I branched the project in my folder ...I didn't think it mattered.."
Ralph: "Ha ha...you see what happens when you don't think...listen..."
- blah blah blah for 10 minutes of hyperbole nonsense of source control check-in 'best practice'

This morning Ralph's computer's hard-drive crashed.
Ralph: "F-k! ..F-k! ... my f-king computer hard drive crashed!"
Me: "Ouch...did you loose anything important?"
Ralph: "A f-king week of code changes."
Me: "You checked everything into source control on Friday ...didn't you?"
Ralph: "F-k no!...I got busy...and...f-k!"
Me: "Look at the bright side, you'll have a good story to tell about the importance of daily check-ins"

Oh...if looks could kill. Karma...you're the best.

WOW!! What a fucking cop out. After what happened yesterday about branching. my senior and our boss had a meeting and I wasn’t included. My senior then message me to next time dont create another branch just use the existing branch even if it was merged. I said “ok but i thought thats the best practice, we we’re doing that since the beginning”. Senior then responded “Whats best practice for our boss, that will be our best practice” what a fucking cop out!!! Bitch!!

Μy best practice dealing with git problems

!Rant

My boss just gave me a task "deploy this project today".
1. Made by a junior dev, and I have to take responsibility to upload it in this short time (no blame to jun dev, she's new and need to practice)
2. In a crm that I personally never used before, I need to study it and adapt at least the paths
3. Task was given at 13.48 during lunch pause.
But
But
The best is yet to come
Wait

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Ready?
4. He doesn't know the server where to deploy it!
No one knows.
The IT doesn't answer, but still, I have to deploy a project TODAY (2h and 47 minutes left eob).

So as all of you web developers know. If you are stepping into the world of web development you stepping into a world of unlimited possibilities, opportunities and adventure.

The flip side is that you step into a world of unlimited choices, tools, best practices, tutorials etc.

Since even for a veteran programmer, this is a little overwhelming, I'd like to take the opportunity to ask you guys for advice.

I know that 'there is no best' and that everything 'depends on what you want to achieve'. So how about just say the pro's and cons or when to use and when not to use. Or why you prefer one over another. Everything is allowed! :D

Maybe it will help others too. Start a nice, professional discussion:)

These are the parts I'd like advice about:

- frontend: what frameworks, libraries
- backend: language, framework, good practice
- server: OS, proxy (nginx, Apache, passenger), extra tips (like don't use root user)
- extras: git, GitHub, docker, anything

Thanks in advance everyone willing to help!:)

Also, if you only know frontend or backend. No worries, just tell me about your specialism!

Security lifehacks 101

Why pay for password managers? Just use one secure password for every service you use! Password managers are really designed for fools who don’t know that you can just use one password for every service and who are ready to pay for that shit.

The best practice is to use your name starting with a capital letter + your main credit card number + CVC code from the back of that card as your go-to password. It’s long and hard to bruteforce and you can remember everything that way! You just need to remember that one password and you’ll always remember your payment info! No need for apple’s bad Apple Pay which is not so secure after all like everything else that Apple offers.

Since we're limiting this to things on my desk I can't do any more deep cuts out of my calculator collection, but this one is still somewhat interesting.

The HP 32S was my friend throughout university, it replaced the 15c I used before which does not live on my desk. The notable thing about the 32s is the fact it's an RPN calculator. RPN calculators are the best way to have friends never ask to borrow your calculator. The exchange will start by them asking to use it, you saying sure, and them handing it back a few minutes later without saying a word.

There's two kinds of people in this world. People who go "wtf" in an interview when asked to create a calculator program using a stack, and people who were oddballs and for whatever reason used reverse polish notation devices.

For those not familiar, rather than entering values into the calculator in "10+10" fashion, you instead provide it a compositional set of values until an operation is provided (10,10,+) at which point it executes. The why is, this type of operation allows the calculator to more naturally process operations, and eliminates the need for parenthesis which makes the operations less error prone in practice and easier to track.

The 32s had a 4 year run before being replaced by the 32SII. In the same way using a Curta will give you a significant understanding of how radix computations and floating points work. Using an HP 32s (or any of its predecessors) will do the same for algebraic functions, because you had to program them yourself using a basic label address system that also had subroutine support.

Kids who grew up with graphing calculators don't know how good you had it 😋

"We've refactored most part of the code to follow best practice. Many of the unit tests are broken. Please help us to fix them all".

Me: Oh joy!!!

Random question that apparently screwed up even Google...

how does an IDE evaluate (and format) code and errors so quickly?

Was thinking maybe building a compiler/programming language would be the best way to learn/practice algorithm... Is it?

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Once again I have loads.

My best teachers were...

The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.

The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.

But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).

Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.

He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.

He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.

As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.

Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.

The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.

You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.

Another gem from same co-worker who is a "Senior Developer". Unnecessary function that fills a dropdown box(?!) with numbers 1-100. I really really hate this guy.

Bonus: Best Practice Example of Naming Variables...

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

How this is a best practice?
What about CI/CD... Every commit to production..?

Wdyt?

So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.

*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*

Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.

I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.

And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.

TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...

TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

So you made this class attriibute private because you don't want other objects to access it. It has a getter that returns the value as-is and a setter that sets whichever value I pass, no checking or processing whatsoever. May I ask why in the fuck you couldn't just make it public?

Ah, yes. Encapsulation. So elegant. I don't know how many turds one can fit into a human brain but we are clearly pushing the limits of what's possible here.

And I recall doing this kind of crap, that's how I was taught and the teacher knows best, right? How could I have known it was utter bullshit. I've seen some abominations in my old code, ripped straight from my notes from school. Dumbass stuff like having a getter that returns by reference, so you can get a handle to the value and then modify it.

I'd ask what's the point of that but I know there is none.

obj->vec.x = y
vs
obj->getVecByRef().x = y

It's the same thing. This private value is fully accessible by all and every other object, and therefore isn't actually private. This is peak shitty OOP.

Absolutely disgraceful how they made me think this was okay. Because that is the way they advertised this to me and so many other kids, "a cleaner way to code that utilizes polymorphic abstractions to better encapsulate data". Bitch what. Does that even mean something?

IMHO there is definite merit to the paradigm itself but not like this. Some shit has to stop. It's not even easier to read, or even write for that matter. Just dumb, fucking dumb dancing in circles for no real benefit. Reminds me of idiotic worrying over security on systems that don't even have network access: just what's the fucking point?

It doesn't matter. None of this bullshit matters. If getters and setters for an attribute don't provide any additional functionality whatsoever then I won't use them. Fuck the conventions, your capsules and your dirty butthole. These functions do nothing. They calculate nothing. They check nothing. They make no additional calls. They're just there because you're a fucking idiot, you were told this was a good idea and you didn't question it.

Well, no more. You can shove these useless methods up your ass where they belong. And the next virgin who says that's bad practice is getting fed his own fucking testicles.

You have been warned.

I've read so many "best practices" on every topic just to come to one conclusion: it depends.

Worst:

Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.

Best:

After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job.

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

Best debugging trick ever:

Wear your fucking glasses while coding so that you do not mistake COMMA(,) with a DOT (.).

So by
1. Doing that (which obviously aren't a huge number) and
2. Cleaning my screen (yes that).

I was able to wrap my head around the issue that almost wasted one day.
So what I intended to pass as string concatenation join operation value actually was being passed as an argument to the underlying function (that wasn't taking care of it and returning a timestamp from thin air).

Murphy's Law in production and practice.
Nice!

Depressing music continues......!

Devops is an HR/management wank-word.

Of course we all know that devops is a lean, next generation, best-practice, shifting focus towards actionable items to facilitate value added integration and synergy between two key silos of the company.

The split second feeling of EXECUTE an UPDATE and SET value without putting WHERE clause.

I froze for a moment with cold sweat that I don't know what to do. My mind went blank.

Thank God it is just the entire list of customer details that is not relate to money issue.

Anyone can suggest the best practice for this type of accident UPDATE / DELETE?
Does using BEGIN TRANS ROLLBACK is safer way to execute?

Head of technical team thinks it's a best practice to include stringified JSONs in the HTTP GET request parameters...

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

Best practice is just a theory 😂

Did I really go to university, have object oriented programming taught to me from scratch and embedded in me as best practice, work with OO frameworks for 3 years and become a damn good web dev just to use Drupal?

Architect: "Inline sql is just as performant as a stored procedure and since it is in code its safer and easier to maintain."

Me, inside my head: "I bet I could do the pencil trick on him from 'The Dark Knight' and it wouldn't hurt him as much as suck the world into the small hole in the front of his head since it is clearly a vacuum which was meant to destroy the earth. This is an obvious plant by the lizard people as a test to see if we could identify them. Killing him would be a..."

Architect: "I mean isn't it still a best practice."

Me, out loud and deadpan: "No, that is wrong and it was never a best practice. "

Me, inside my head: "Crisis averted."

Somebody asked me for help on their thesis, gave them advise, how they should do it, what are the best practices on implementing things...

I asked the today how are they doing? They answered, we paid someone to do it, we can't do it...

Damn are they even studying and doing their daily programming practice???

Here's something I just remembered and wish I hadn't. During my senior year in the horrifyingly fucked up abyss of despair that is the "tech" oriented highschool I wasted my teens to attend, we had two programming teachers.

You might ask why the fuck, well the system is corrupt and a smalltable of serial pedophiles thinks kids are more productive if you make them go to school two times a day. Eh, just let 'em off for about hour and a half in-between uninterrupted bouts of twenty-four hundred minutes of classroom torture so they can eat, jerkoff and take a shit, not necessarily in that order.

So you spend four hours of your day listening to someone who doesn't even know what a computer is go on about fucking ethics in technology like anyone gives a shit, then you're free to have lunch and smoke some crack, and then you're back in school, but this time you're on the lab/workshop.

Oh, and there you get to do cool stuff, right? Yeah, if by "do cool stuff" you mean get electrocuted and fingernails hammered in, we do not care about student safety that is our trademark and all fucking rights reserved. Charming as shit.

Anyhoo, fastforward to senior year and I'm in the kvnsolerat squad pretty much not giving a fuck anymore as the disconnect between the teachers themselves is so inexcusably ridiculous it more than deserves the full contempt of every student.

We have two programming teachers as I said,

one "teaches" us theory during the first run: he's barely a few years older than us and is asking we learn sockets on our own.

The other is in the lab, she's older than hair gel and I hope has already died in some extremelly painful way, bitch has taught NOTHING but html for the last THIRTEEN FUCKING YEARS

Now I'm okay with this <shit>and this</shit> as I find it charming and all but why in the name of fuck am I even bothering showing up to school if the classroom guy teaches no fucking theory and the lab crone doesn't even care to know what theory we should be putting into practice? DROPPING THE FUCK OUT and skipping universities altogether seems like an EXCELLENT idea right now. I'm game!

A decade later, I awake to a minor bleed coming out my fucking dick and I'm still not as fazed by that as I am by the tenebrous memories of these useless fucking morons sucking the life out my teenage self for no fucking reason. I wake late at night, shambling, pale, sweating, not for the blood that drips from the tip of my cock, but for the utter disgust I feel at the thought of these bullshit educational institutions.

Let me repeat this. One guy, ASKING us to learn about sockets, ON OUR OWN, and that's what goes in the fucking exam. But we don't have the time to study because we then go to the lab, where we don't get to learn about sockets, WE'RE STILL MAKING SOME FUCKING KAWAII WEB PAGES FOR THE LOCAL VETERINARIAN. GENIUS. FUCKING 10/10. SYNERGY.

And you know what hurts me the most? Bumbling dumbfuck that I am, I WAS AMONG THE BEST OF MY CLASS. I WAS THE KID TEACHING THE OTHER KIDS. I LOVE PROGRAMMING RIGHT NOW AND I LOVED IT BACK THEN. I was INTERESTED in learning MORE and they taught me FUCKING NOTHING. Worst of all, DIDN'T EVEN GIVE ME FREE TIME SO I COULD LEARN ON MY OWN. THESE kinds of "TEACHERS" are the SHITSTAINS on the curtain! I DONT WANT THEM FIRED, I WANT THEM DEAD.

THIS IS LONG, NONSENSICAL AND I DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT THE PUNCHLINE IS SUPPOSED TO BE IM JUST RABID. They FUCKED me! I was FUCKED by PROFESSIONAL assholes! AND I CANNOT WASH AWAY THIS MEMORY. FUUUUUK

But WAIT. I can go visit whenever schools open up... play nice... gain their trust... show them all the crazy stuff I've built... get 'em slowly on my side... make them like me... make them think highly of me... respect my goddamn beaten-up, washed-up and traumatized brains... then SLAP THEM SQUARE IN THE FUCKING JAW WITH ALL THE BULLSHIT THEY PUT ME THROUGH. DENOUNCE THEM PUBLICLY. FLOG THEIR MOTHER FUCKING BUTTCHEEKS TILL THEY ASK FOR FORGIVENESS. I'LL TAKE A GOOD FUCKING SHIT RIGHT ON THEIR MOUTHS AND THEN CUM ON THEIR FACES AS THEY DIE. MY VENGEANCE SHALL BE COMPLETE.

I THINK I'VE LOST IT AND I HAVE NO IDEA IF ANY OF THIS MAKES SENSE BUT I FEEL BAD DISCARDING IT SO I'LL JUST CLICK POST LIKE A RETARD. TA-TA

Here comes your millennial diagnosis of a hype word filled architecture and how its affecting me:

I was diagnosed with a mentally and socially crippling degree of OCD at a young age. As I got older and away from areas that contain hundreds of people on daily basis, my tendencies resided but still manifest themselves in lesser ways. Over the last 8 years of development, I've taught myself to steer these compulsive tendencies into the art of software architecture and code quality.

Over the last 3 years Ive become more obsessed with the concept of designing agnostic, pluggable pieces that are weighed down by very few dependencies. I had not read any books on pluggable architecture or dove deep into what SOLID means to me. It just "naturally" felt like an evolutionary step in where my software quality needed to go. I had never approached microservice architecture and at the time knew little of it so instead I went as far as breaking php or node components up into their own packages on npm/packagist. Making packages of them was as far as I could go to assure my components were entirely plug and play. It helped my mind understand them as separate entities and devs after me know that they in no way could depend on my core suite of services.

Then I ran into this "Clean architecture" book and my initial reaction through out it was "hmm, this is a much better way of achieving what I've organically been coming to". Inverted dependency was new to me. I had heard it a thousand times but never put it to practice. I approached agnostic behavior by much harder means of separating binaries into their own address spaces or combining them from different binaries to run in synchrony. The idea of pushing hard decisions off and separating concerns through interfaces was an eye opener but my it still does not solve the issue of monster repos.

I don't understand how teams allow services to grow exponentially with little check and Idk want to know. It doesnt take a principle dev with 20 years experience to say "this shits starting to get out of hand, lets split it". The minute you are forced to use your IDE's global search to work efficiently within the code base, it's too late. As silly as separating a project by npm packages sounds, it still was just a logical means of breaking up something far too complex so that it doesnt get in its own way.

Then came micro-services or my final realization of it. Ive found a perfect placement that satisfies my own compulsion for cleanliness between the principles of clean arch (or onion, or port arch) and service oriented arch. Teams work well within small codebases. They work well with low dependencies. They work well in a suite of services that can be plucked and rewritten without cascading dependencies to consider. Teams work well when given hard http specs to abide by when talking with other services or with a gateway.

Now someone tell me where in the flipping fuck I can work where these architectures are taken advantage of. Ive been through 3 companies in three years and each has been a shit show of monolithic web apps, mono api's. Shit our last suite thats now sunsetted was 600k lines of vanilla php, no framework, no orm, different approaches to architecture that did not unify, high dependencies, one repo.

The biggest thing coming out of that for me was knowing what I despise in architecture. Having these horror stories to pass on forever when discussing our bright futures. Im rambling now but I suppose that becomes the closure needed for this ted talk. Going through hell and coming out with a lesson learned. Feeding my mental disadvantages in life with best practices in my career.

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

When having to fix parts from an other programmer's code, do NOT concentrate on the small code expected to be wrong, instead read and understand the whole program around it!

Best practice:
1) Why is this code here
2) What does this code do
3) How does the code solve the problem

(just happened to me 😅)

My best experience is essentially being taught the creativity and adventure aspect of development.

My first second year programming lecturer (left early on for reasons) knew that our curriculum was stupidly easy and instead of focusing on it, he tried to give us a sense of wonder and exploration about the subject so that we can grow. It was well needed advice, seeing as my class fears programming because they never practice it.

IT sucked when he had to move on, but he managed to get the message across. I don't think I'd be as passionate about development this year if he wasn't around. It's not always just stringing instructions together for money. It's also exploring and creativity to find your way and build something awesome.

I read alot of rants where people describe that they had to implement things they know were wrong and later the boss complained about it although its what he said.

My requirements engineering professor always told us to document everything. Every change made to the requirements must have the source and the reason written down. Idealy with some sort of signature from the boss.

But i understand its not always that easy or done. Which is kinda sad.

"The best theory is inspired by practice. The best practice is inspired by theory." - Donald Knuth

if (rant !== story)
System.out.println("Dev rant story time")

A coworker mentioned to me that I might have depression as part of my personality. They think this because I always feel at my best when I'm being active/productive (programming) or doing meditation practice. I thought that was strange.

Bit of a brief background, I've had depression since I was about 12 and I still get small bouts of it into my late 20's. I've been on antidepressiants for a very short time and I've been through talk therapy multiple times. It was a lot worse then it is now and I believed I have it under control.

My coworker thinks that I ended up dealing with it for so long that it has become a part of my personality so I don't notice it actively. The whole thing has left me sort of, I don't know, jaded. Or maybe just afraid that it could be true?

I thought about how I have a very all or nothing attitude in life. I don't think about getting a house because I don't put too much faith in myself towards having a family. Or how I have to make very radical changes to my life immediately if something starts triggering the new depressive episode. If I can't code or read at night I'll hope in the car and drive with no destination in mind for several hours just to keep my mind at ease.

I don't know. It sorta upsets me because I always thought of depression as something you need to "get out of", but now I wonder if my case was severe enough that I've adapted my life around it.

Fucking unreal bro!!! I’m working on an issue and I pushed, then there was a bug, i fixed it again, another issue for the UI change, another fixed for sorting column. All that fixed I created separate branch. My boss called me and told me im stupid for creating a separate branch everytime on a simple fix, he told me that Git isnt used that way. He told me that his been doing this 30years already. So I asked isnt it the best practice to create a separate branch on every issue or if the branch has been merged? His answer is no. Fuck this guy and his 30years experience

I should’ve responded:
First of all, if we have a test suite then I would have notice that error but we dont. You dont even want to upgrade ruby and rails. We’re stuck at version 4 on rails. Second why are you merging my MR and reviewing it on IST? Why didnt you do that locally so you can address the issue before you merged? Third fuck you and your 30years

My actual response is:
Ahh yes sir, im sorry wont happen again, my bad, sorry for that mistake.

Fuck bro im mad!!!!

I think it's a scam that the multinational corporations have pulled off that they've managed to get everyone to call and equate something technical and legally specific, "piracy."

Piracy is the theft and resale of physical goods. Copyright infringement is not piracy. It's a crime(in most countries), for sure, but it isn't piracy. The word "piracy" is emotionally charged, and its use serves the interests of corporate profit, not the interest of the origination of creative works, and certainly not your best interest. It's a deceptive practice. It's a lie.

But "copyright infringement," and "intellectual property," don't grab readers' attention like, "piracy." So, like how DeBeers has indoctrinated the world into thinking that diamonds are valuable, the RIAA, MPAA, and the BSA have indoctrinated the world into buying into the lie that copyright infringement and piracy are the same thing.

By always striving to do better each time. Making code less sloppy every time I write GL code. Better performance everytime I write an algorithm. Lower memory usage every time I write application state. Learning a new trick for an old problem, one at a time.

Learning best practice in one go is impossible, but taking it a bit at a time makes things more reasonable.

I was away for a long time. Now I got a new job which means it's time to start ranting. Fuck this legacy code is worse. I mean, a fucking cat running after a mouse could write a better source code if he had somehow pushed buttons while doing its job. Every fucking best practice I know is crushed to bits. And the funny part is, this company/startup recently got $300.000 funding.

First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P

Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.

Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think

Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee

And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output

Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)

Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D

Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude.

I love listening to music when programming. It's not something I started because I wanted to, but it just kinda happened.

In my first job as an intern, they followed concept of open office, a very shitty strategy as it led to chaos and noise all the time around my desk. To move away from that, bought a pair of Sony headphones, which I still consider as my best investment.

Started listening to songs since they're a better choice in the cacophony of chaos present around. These days, even though I work in a regular and calm environment still can't seem to get rid of the practice of listening to songs.

Anyone here have similar experience??

P.S. Suggest some good songs to listen to while programming!!

Facepalm Monday...
My collegue denies to provide breaking changes in our login API in a separate version to the other teams depending on it.

What is the reason for his stubborn rejection?
It's scrum. We haven't planned the effort for realising a versioning concept for our API.
Let's build it in the next sprint as a part of live deployment strategy.

The point he miss is that the ProductOwner wants his API change deployed during the next sprint.
Additionally, it is best practice, having a compatible, deployable product after each sprint, without any risks.
Furthermore, another best practice to provide your API is one URI without a version part holding the current development of the API. And URIs with a version part in it to keep a specific request/response structure and behavior.

What really grind my gears are sayings like 'if the other teams had well programmed their software, modifying our API won't have any effect on them'

C'mon dude. That's far from reality, as anybody knows.

I can't accept, we provide unprofessional API builds, as he is going to do.

So, i have to spend my time and energy to change his mind, together with other software-architects, planning the big thing API-Gateway *sigh*

Context:
I recently joined a team and we are working on a fairly large mobile app using RN, they started a month ago. And I noticed, they don't have any fucking tests and static typings like Typescript.

I have this pretentious team leader that acts like he's the BeSt dEveLopEr in ThE woRld, and act like he always know what he's doing. But in reality, he code like crap, the formatting is shit because the ESLint config is not working, he's not even aware of it until I've fixed it. He's using every BAD Practice available, unused variables and imports are scattered everywhere, etc. And the directory structure is crap and no consistency.

How can I convince this ignorant mofo to use tests and typescript? He believes that adding those will take us longer and cost more money to the client, based on my experience, this is not the case, it's only slow on the first 2 weeks and it is worth it in the long run.

If i was to start coding today with all the things that are available right now i would be super humbled and would have learnt very quickly .
If you are a beginner and want to get started in coding the first thing you should do is just start.
Coding is all about practice and consistency.
Dont give up
Make google your best friend .
Try to google like crazy and you will be able to get answers to almost any damn question.

I've been doing interview prep for almost two months now (off and on). Doing this course online to better understand algorithms and doing Leetcode problems here and there. Definitely not putting in 6 or even 8 hours a day into studying since I'm working, but fuck I feel so discouraged when I'm not even able to get an "easy" problem.

I really want to get better, and I know it takes a lot of patient and practice when it comes to problems. I try my best to tell myself "you haven't learned this yet" or "you'll get it soon", but in the end I just feel so discouraged that I want to quit practicing for interviews.

I hate that this profession requires people to spend X months or even years studying for an interview. That the 3-5 years of relative and good work experience means nothing more than passing a resume screening to get to a coding interview where they ask you a problem you'll never face in your career at X company.

Do I hate the process because I'm just bad at algorithms I don't use often? Or would I feel like it's just and fair if I understood things easier and were able to land jobs easily because I get all the algorithms?

I just want to be better.

Has anybody been forced by a PM or someone else to send clients passwords via email?

How should I tell them it's not best practice even if they are insisting?

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

Has anyone ever worked on a project with no architect or team lead? And where no team member has knowledge of OOP or functional, or restful design, or deep framework knowledge or deep language knowledge? And where the accepted best practice for all devs is to copy paste everything so that there is no area you can change and cause breakage elsewhere? And people regularly commit 1000s of lines methods and have never unit tested before?

Because I do right now. Feel free to ask questions of you want.

How ofte are you guys absolutely sure that you've picked the right solution for a specific problem? As a novice programmer it bugs me to death that I sometimes don't know if I'm using a "best practice" solution

"Always program as if someone who has to work with your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

I build a website based on express js.
I want to create some unit-test for my web-pages.

It is always possible to use `http` package, send a "mocked" request, get the result, and perform some regex.

The problem is:
1. How can I maintain session?
2. Is it even necessary?

When it comes to web development, I have no idea about TDD best (and easy) practice :(

So, our lab professor in university for data structures was evaluating my friend's group assignment next to me and my colleague.

Professor: So, what does this method do?

Friend: I feel it would be best to explain our structure first and then how our methods work.

P: No, no. It's okay, I'm seeing it here in my laptop. *Looking at their report which included nothing about the structure of the assignment since she asked specifically only to place the methods and their complexity analysis due to not having time to look and evaluate a full report for each group*

F: Okay, *proceeds to explain*.

P: Okay, and why is your code commented?

F: Because it's good practice and we learned in subject x last semester.

P: Impossible! I teach that subject and I did not teach that in my classes.

F: Okay, but our professor did.

P: *Says nothing*.

They got a 3.25/5 as a grade for it and got really pissed off. I mean, they spent a lot of time making the assignment's structure perfect, optimizing their code and the professor did not care for the structure, just the methods, on the data structures subject.
FYI, they are workaholic, dedicate a lot of time improving their skills and their normal grades are usually >= 4.25.

what is the best way to practice algorithms?

Co worker who makes the sliders/ banners for the site asks how to get his form input beside on the right side... asks all three people in his department... worker with "20 years experience" says they should use "!important"
😳Ahhh best practice says DO IT RIGHT!

I feel like there's an over saturation of dev sites talking about "tutorial this" and "best practice that". Would be refreshing to have developers just talk about their grind and not so much their showing off of what they just learned from Stack.....oh wait a minute!! Must be how this devRant came to be! Hmmm....fuck me, epiphany. Who knew?

I asked this on Twitter, but I get the feeling that I might get more responses here and I'm really curious to know what people's answers are.

No judgement question: As a developer, when you’re working on a project that involves something you’ve done previously, how often do you check if the way you previously did it is still the recommended way before referring to your old code to accomplish the task?

Guys, i just placed a div of class row in my form legend,i don't know if this is a best practice but it works 😅

Techsmith Snagit... Silently downloaded an update. UAC pops out from (seemingly) nothing. "msiexec.exe" want's to have permission... NO - SIMPLY NO...

I know it's legitimate, because msiexec starts the updater, but thats far away from best practice...

Th frustration when you get a strignified json from a third party api, they say that's the best practice. Fml

What is the best way to learn QA automation? Any ideas? If you have links to tutorial and also the download content for me to practice that would be great!!! Thanks

PM, we are going to go to an agile methodology for working. (despite PM having never done agile, and most of the team having never done agile) But we will have 4 week sprints, as 2 week sprints are too short. We are going to have daily stand ups, oh but we'll only have then once a week... And we will keep the 3 hour mid week meeting. Oh and we'll keep our existing JIRA, but you also need to use *new* JIRA as well, but that's going to the customer so don't post bugs on it.... (all with a ln important delivery in a few months) The suggestion of getting an adviser (either internal or external) who has experience with agile to help us transition smoothly and provide best practice got shot down. feels like the blind leading the blind...

why so little books about enterprise paradigm on developer (best practice/app lifecycle/scrum, etc) when so many resources about coding

During interview about possible spying by Huawei President of Czech republic said few minutes ago that he will do his best to try to negotiate our stand with China, since he does not see any problem with possible spying, because its common practice of trade war between tech giants. He later added that he does not think that leaked names and addresses might be any problem "What would people do with such an info".

I mean... what difference would make if he had a lobotomy?

Need opinions: When your knowledgeable colleague backend-developer chooses 1,2,4,8,16 as enum values instead of 1,2,3,4,5 (for roles associated with permissions, which may be cumulatable) in order to be able to do bitwise operations, is it a sound decision for this scenario? Is it a best practice, just as good, or pedantic?

I want to master bitwise but have a hard time grasping such operations as quickly as logical ones.

Any one running Symfony on a Docker container in production? I currently try to migrate our dev env to a docker compose setup (from a "monolith" vagrant vm). I'm atually not stuck at a Symfony specific thing, but on a, I guess Docker specific one(?), The issue is, I need to read and write with two users to one folder (in my case the /application/var/cache folder). Since I mount my whole code into the docker container (to use an IDE on the local files), I've got a volume (not mounted to the outside world) for that folder. (As far, as good). Now this folder is owned by root and root is also the user I get when I enter the container. When I then run a cli script, that writes to this folder, every thing works (as it's run by root) and the resulting entries in the cache dir are owned by root. Trouble starts when the php fpm process tries to write stuff in there too (as it's run by www-data).
If I add `USER www-data` (or create a new user foobar and add `USER foobar`) the container exits with status 0

So I guess the question is, is anyone running an Symfony app on Docker in Prod, if so how do you solve this? Or another question would be what is the best practice to do this? Sure on dev I could just `chmod 777` the whole folder or run the php-fpm process as root, but if that thing ever goes to prod, I wouldn't sleep very well...

After my trainig period in the new job (10 weeks), I joined a different department with very expirenced guys, one of them got my mentor, with him I was at my first plant (continues casting platn where next to me where thousands of kg molten steel) where we updated all controllers to a OS. From him I learned all the real life best practice stuff as well as the internal dev tools.
Without him I would not be able to be mentor to my new college now.
And also he became a friend

What is the best practice for bugs free code?

Hi there!

I've been worrying about the following problem for months now and I don't find any solution. Maybe anybody of you can lead me the way.

We are developing a software suite which consists of a number of desktop applications:

* 12 applications written in C++; all over 20 years old; further development by 5 or 6 guys (one man armys) - mainly bugfixing, changes of law implementations, small features
* 2 applications we are currently writing in C#; completely new developments of existing C++ applications; scrum teams with at least 5 guys; this is, where we put our focus in

These applications (C++ and C#) are sharing some core assemblies and are interacting with each other. So they are not independent.

We organize them in a mono repository in one huge solution, which consists currently of about 500 projects.

Advantages:

* With all projects in one solution and through project references, Visual Studio takes care of the right build order
* Code navigation is superb - every single line of code is accessible - this makes refactoring easy
* Every developer can map the branch and build the whole suite locally
* Debugging on the local machine is easy
* DevOps pipeline is straight forward - it just have to build a single solution

Disadvantages:

* The huge solution is extremely slow.
* If you want to build the solution or you want to debug (which does essentially the same as a pre step) Visual Studio is building a lot of projects, although they haven't been changed. Their detection is buggy. So sometimes you wait 2 minutes until it starts the app. That slows us down a lot.
* Full builds need about an hour, because its building the same projects (even if they haven't been changed) over and over again (with ready made nuget packages this could be improved a lot I think)
* If a core team member changes some core apis, he is changing the calling code too, although he doesn't know the calling code, because another team has written it. I don't think, that's best practice and it doesn't scale.
* Often, a C# developer has to mess around with C++ building problems, because the C++ projects are in the same solution
* It gets more and more confusing and frustrating, because there is no clear organizational seperation between apps and nobody can't just focus on his app alone.

Idea:

I was thinking about putting the whole framework and core projects in a new solution (around 100 projects). Then we could take all old C++ projects and put them also in a new solution (around 200 projects). This would leave the newer projects (new applications - C#) in the existing solution.

This should speed up things, and would be a first step to better seperation, BUT:

How should the integration process look like?

Scenario: Core team is changing an API in our framework

Current process: Because all projects are in the same solution, they change the calling code too. So it's immediately integrated and the app developers just have to do "get latest".

New process (?): Core team is providing the changes through a nuget package (new version). So does every developer now has to keep track of if there is a new package version and if yes, do the integration? And how can we coordinate the different teams, so they are upgrading all at the same time? Because we ship our applications as a suite, all apps has to use the same versions. Or should we automate the integration process? Is there a best practice?

I have to add, that our core team is making changes very frequently, so the integration process will have to happen often.

Any ideas/feedback/inspiration?

Thank you so much in advance!

I want to store my built application inside of some kind of registry or repository. Is this best practice and are there tools for doing this? I cant find anything except Artifactory, which is pretty expensive.

Searching for simples game using canvas + vanilla ES6 and best practices.
Turn out it's very hard to find well-written javascript, so far most of the resources found are spaghetti code.
So if you know any good github page, blogs or tuto, feel free to share! Thanks :D

I'm in need of advice. I reckon this is no stack overflow but that's probably for the best as I wouldn't feel as comfortable posting there as I am doing it here. So, back to the question: I'm currently working with legacy code, written in .NET 2.0. This code is responsible for calling upon PEC services in order to finally create personal smart cards. I was tasked with the job of creating a repository system that would allow the program to call on the old legacy services or the new ones without any distinction. We are talking about SOAP services in both cases. The issues is: the new service definition is comprised of soap policies. This wouldn't be a problem per se, with more modern version of the framework, but with .NET 2.0? Yes, it is. It doesn't support policies and signing the body with a certificate right out of the box. How can I manage this? I feel like the only way would be letting the proxy class do its thing up until the very last moment: intercept the SOAP request before its sent and modify it according to the specifications. But I reckon this is very bad practice. Is there any other way out of this?

Thanks for anyone that would like to help. 🙂

soo, i am unknowledgeable of ALL best practice.

lets say i call a php file called loader.php with a $_GET['type'] parameter, then after i check if type is actually set i switch the parameter and my logic then does stuff appropriate for $type..

do i create a lot of sub files with the program logic in it or do i just create subfunction (which i have to pass variables if necessary)?

Switch( $_GET['type'] ) { case 'foo': include "logic/foo.php"; break; default: echo "error"; break; }

or is the whole concept totally alien and stupid? i most honestly say that i dont know exactly what i could google to find an answer

Been working on pen testing an old ass web app written in a combination of 4 languages with the primary being asp, serious question for the older generation was concatenating SQL statements ever best practice or are the mob that wrote this just useless?

Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books 💙
- Alan Turing

When I see a blog post advertising “best practice for _____” but you didn’t write it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been using it longer than your company has existed” ... I feel angry and don’t trust what you say, even if you’re right. You can share what your experience has been, but nobody died and made you god of the technology.

So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.

He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.

Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.

Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.

I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized.

! rant, I hope😗

To anybody with MySQL/Mariadb experience, how different are these two as I need to pick one for a database application I'm building.

Also, and God will I sound like an amature for asking, is it best practice to debug and deploy the SQL database on an actual hosted server or to just do it on the client PC? I have both and I want to work with whichever one will give me less of a headache.😣

Any feedback would be helpful! The server is Debian and the client is Arch Linux.

That moment when the 'react-native init' project does not meet the widely known best practice 'airbnb es lint' code standards.

Hey ranters, I want to setup a centralised auth backend that assigns multiple logins/API keys to a single user account which is managed through a Frontend application.

Background is we use multiple services each with their own login system and not all support a unified login/auth method for their API.

My approach is to setup a simple API/Auth backend that stores the users credentials plus multiple API-Keys of other services or their logins. When auth is successful the Frontend app may receive the associated credentials for the other backends to call their respective API. So the user can login once but the Frontend may access all backend services without the user noticing that their are other auths.

This should be a really general problem today. I'm really just diving into the topic of auth and Frontend, so I hope to get some guidence/overview from you. My questions are:

- Is my approach totally stupid?
- Are there good frameworks you'd recommend for such a setup?
- Is there a best practice which I've overseen so far?
- Resources you think are a must-read?
- Any other recommendations regarding security here?

So, what do you ranters think?

Not being sure about if the way I did or implemented a feature/functionality was the best practice and if not, is it worth it to try to come with a better way of doing it? I get paranoid about having problems showing up now because I did something not thinking ahead in the past

Im currently working on a electron project. Is there any best practice for UI design? I want to make a VS Code-like UI with resizable panels. Do I have to do that on my own using jquery-ui for example?

On the office we have began to discuss which is best practice in a REST API when reference other objects.

Things like:

A)

```
{
"id": 1,
"field1": "value1",
"referenced": <id>
}
```

or

B)

```
{
"id": 1,
"field1": "value1",
"referenced": {
"id": <id>
}
}
```

I prefer B. What do you think?

Commons sense/ best practice:

Is It ok ti initialize (angular) variabile as {id:" ", name:" ", ..} to avoid errors in the browser console such as "can't get ID of undefined"?

My concern is code readability and debugging, is not ok for the ones looking at the browser console to have such useless errors, on the other side you have to initialize some variables with object that have a lot of keys(id name ecc...) Whith empty fields...useless.

The apps work both cases, whit or whitouth initialization.
By the way we are getting such data by api calls later on.

Ummm, maybe it's a little bit offtopic but could anyone help me with pointers in C language? The best would be some free exercises or tutorials from the internet that I didn't find...(I was looking for a long time before this desperate post...:/)
If it does not belong here, pls, let me know and I will delete this post!
Thank you so much :)
(Ps: I will have a big exam on Tuesday so I want to practice..)

For persistence, either credentials or data, is there any best practice that prefer DATABASES over FILES? Files such as JSON or txt or whatever...
Do dbs offer better perfomance or security?💾

"Why did you use this X"

I hate to answer this question . i used 'x' because:
1. <a valid reasoning comprising of a problem that i know x would solve> OR
2. i saw it in a repo being used/ someone popular saying it as best practice to use it, so i used it blindly OR
3. (mix of 1&2) : i once was stuck in a problem and tried to blindly add x to my project without understanding much about it but to check if adding x would solve my problem, and it did, so from that day on wards i started using x blindly OR
4. (just like 3 but even more lame) : I used x because i like it this way

My answer is usually 2,3 or 4. If i have to start answering 1st point, i think i have to go back my last 10 years of education and correct everything from scratch :'/ and maybe then i would realise there a lot of stuff or 'X' s that i don't really need to learn , since some 'k' thing can already do it ( eg, do we really need java, c, c++ when we could write a billion lines of code in assembly, do you really need react when you can do everything in html/css/js?)
( just trying to prove that having the 1st point as answer is not the always correct one,in a very shitty way)

Sometimes this follows an even worse "and not 'Y' ?" which is so much more terrible. If i had known both 'X' and 'Y' in depth, i would have been telling you about that without your additional question. I feel shit scared to answer "because i don't know 'Y' ", but that's all i got

Thoughts?

what's the best practice to divide long task into functions? suppose I have function of 200+ lines then from the code readability point doing short functions would be better?

Hello folks, have a question, I can't decide if I should install windows 7 (super stable Windows btw) or a Linux distribution (debian or Ubuntu 14), I've always been a Windows guy and was thinking of switching to Linux on my new free dos laptop and wanted to have a hand on Linux, but please I don't want that Windows/Linux fight I just need real advice. Some friends told me to get Windows 7 and a VM Linux just for practice, I also thought about having a dual boot Windows Linux server , I think it would be the best config for me.. so..?

Not best practice whatsoever because the box was most likely owned, but...

SSH kept defaulting back to port 22 when it wasn't supposed to. So, wrote a cronjob that checked diff between SSH config and backed up SSH config. If different, reload backup. Didn't get locked out again.

Box has of course been replaced.

Not a dev yet (pretty fucking far from it actually) but I really enjoy coding and learning but I feel like I chose the wrong motive
I started leaning Java because it was easy to find a job since it's very popular and I got the basics pretty well integrated but I feel like I can't really do anything I wanted to do with it, I wanted to build small pieces of software that would run on windows and Linux but the fact that Java needs the jvm to work on a system makes me feel uncomfortable, I don't know why, and that makes me wanna switch to c++ even tho i think it's harder to learn.
I know it's bad practice not sticking to what I learn and pursue it but I don't know what to do with Java...
Any advice?

Sry not really a rant but you guys are the best dev community out there so I figured...

Tldr: feel like I can't do what I want with Java, want to switch to learning c++ and drop Java for now whatcha think?

I'm not experienced in VB Forms. So can someone who is, tell me if I'm just too inexperienced or if Im right about this?
Im tasked with fixing some bugs in a VB Forms project that a privious employee wrote some years ago. When I opened the project and checked it out, there was over 5600 lines of code in the codebehind for the form.
I feel like this is somewhat bad practice, no comments, no documentation... Nothing. And to top it off, among the worst naming of Subs and variables ever. Stuff like: "Run", "Stop", "Feeder", "When Load".
Oh, and the best part? The guy forgot some test code in the software, so when he left, the software stoped functioning. For real, he coded in a dependency to his own account in The AD.

What's your team's best practice when using JIRA (on premises or cloud) and VSTS or GitHub?

Who manages issues/tickets and are they duplicated in both locations? Is one for PM only and other for Devs??

We have both tools and I'm trying to figure out a workflow that doesn't kill devs and PMs.

We have Office 365 so I heavily use MS Flow to help (Jira bug turns into vsts work item) etc, but any insight from anyone who has a similar setup would be appreciated!

eleventy localization still lacks good examples and useful best practice. Localizing symfony projects seemed way more easy and logical to me

I have recently learned to use data binding with recyclerView in android. I need to make some network calls on the click of a button at the recyclerView, and based on response I need to update my UI. All my code for the view is in my ViewHolder. Bt all the code for my network calls are in repository which is accessed by my viewModel. how can I make the network calls from the viewHolder?

Learning C# coming from Java...
What's the fuss about properties? As i see it, theyre only usefull for binding, as else they just work as syntetic sugar instead of getter/setter methods.
But properties are also limited to give response back, like a successfull set, unless you start throwing exceptions..
And if a set property has if(age>5){this.age=age} then if i pass the property a 4, you will never know as a user that it failed (again, unless you start throwing exceptions)
Im kinda feeling like i want to use get/set methods until i need to bind, then of course use property ?? Am i all off here?

Recently created a simple nodeJS-mongodb backend for my android app. Is it bad practice to send a potentially big object with arrays to my front end ? I've been struggling implementing this alongside with an ORM because I can't store arrays in my sql ORM.

There's no one correct way to get better. As with any skill, practice is one of the best ways to hone those skills. Various methods for that. Researching best practices, repetition, personal projects, professional development classes, online resources like codewars, codecademy, learn _ the hard way, etc