preface: I'm fucking exhausted and angry.

Why does everyone assume I know how to do frontend?
Why am I always the design girl?
Why?

You hire me to do backend. STOP GIVING ME FRONTEND DESIGN CRAP. I HATE IT.

AND STOP GODDAMN YELLING AT ME FOR NOT MAKING SOMETHING RESPONSIVE.

I DON'T KNOW HOW.

yes i can learn, but I CAN'T FUCKING PICK UP A SKILL LIKE THAT IN A DAY. Also, I fucking hate it.

STICK IT UP YOUR (min-width: 1400px) ASS.

But seriously, I've spent 13 hours today figuring out completely new things (webpack, susy, express.js, cloudinary, responsive best practices, more webpack) because the boss is in panic-mode (his preferred state) and wants this project released last monday.

guess what? it isn't done.
because i still don't know how to do everything. and ofc there's nobody to ask because there never fucking is.

Seriously, boss-man. hire a fucking designer, and stop being an illiterate sales goon while you're at it. ffs.

TOP 10 PROGRAMMING BEST PRACTICES

#1 Start numbering from 0.
#10 Sort elements in lexicographic order for readability.
    #2 Use consistent indentation.
#3 use Consistent Casing.
#4.000000000000001 Use floating-point arithmetic only where necessary.
#5 Not avoiding double negations is not smart.
#6 Not recommended is Yoda style.
#7 See rule #7.
#8 Avoid deadlocks.
#9 ISO-8859 is passé - Use UTF-8 if you ▯ Unicode.
#A Prefer base 10 for human-readable messages.
#10 See rule #7.
#10 Don't repeat yourself.

"Can you put my site as the first result on google?"

I can add SEO to your site, just give me your preferred keywords, a description, and let's make sure we follow white hat best practices etc.

"No call someone at google and ask how much to go to the top of the list"

So you want to pay for ads or..?

"No get a figure I can pay to get to first page"
"Or can you just edit the google"

... And so I never renewed that contract ever again, the end.

Let's get rid of the developer training: Pair Programming

Let's get rid of the software testers: Test First Programming

Let's get rid of the project managers: Agile

Let's get rid of the project planners: Scrum

Let's get rid of the system admins: DevOps

Let's get rid of the security guys: DevOpsSec

Let's get rid of the hardware budget: Bring Your Own Device

Let's get rid of the servers: Cloud Computing

Let's get rid of the other scruffy guys: Outsourcing

Let's get rid of the office space: Home Office

Let's get rid of the whole fucking company: Takeover

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.

Boss: Great news, we are getting another backend dev from another team to help us out.

Me: Cool, hopefully we don’t have the same trouble as the others, not replying, never writing anything down etc.

Boss: No, I’ve worked with her before. She’s much more passionate about doing things right, using best practices and all that stuff.

Me: Oh that’s perfect, great news!

Boss: Yep! ... just be aware she has a tendency to get very easily confused. She delivers the wrong thing from time to time and might need to redo stuff semi-regularly.

Me: ... ... ...

Boss: It’ll all work out. Don’t worry. Ok gotta run.

devRant is a place to rant. Not a journal of best practices.

Can I just rant without giving a long winded backstory?

Do I have to explain myself to prevent people from commenting that the problem must be me?

If you read a rant, and you can't relate to it sympathetically.

Move along! That rant is not for you!

When people are trying to vent no one wants to see your snippy little comment about how 'unprofessional' they are being.

I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.

Why not have a custom (500 line) JSON mapper... you know... fuck those auto mapping libraries out there...

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.

You just came in today, being new in your position. I've been with the company for around 5 years, and you're the new guy. Look, I absolutely respect your skills. You're not a newbie coming out of uni, ok? You're a skilled sysadmin. But you asking me "what is your college?" and after me telling you I majored in linguistics, your answer "huh, that's why" and explaining why I'm wrong in my programming practices (which are taken from the Apache foundation) is utterly bullshit. Fuck off!

1) The fact that you have a BS in CS doesn't mean you know the best. I've worked as a programmer for some time. You were never paid to write a line of code.

2) Even if you were absolutely, positively, non-questionably right, you have no right to be condescending.

So, can you just shove your degree far up your ass? Because my friend, you're uppity as fuck just because you spent 4 years in college learning theory that you never applied in real world. I spent years learning my programming skills alone, after 9 to 5 work, during the evenings and fucking weekends. I don't need to prove myself to you, you fuckity fuck, I have proven myself to our employer over the last five fucking years.

Fuuuuuuuck!

Public service announcement: Do not get married to your language, tools, or way of doing things. If there's an easier solution to something, try it before dismissing it. No language is perfect, and dumping everything on the responsibility of an API or framework can cause more headache then solve it.

Case in point: I love Java for backend programming, but node.js is a better solution to frontend programming then depending on JSP's and HTML within the same Java project. Less things go wrong and it's easier to debug issues.

There is no best programming language. Only best practices and using the right tool for the right job.

#exceptC++fuckthatlanguage

:^)

Starting a new project

Me: This time we'll follow all the best practices, do atomic commits and write meaningful commit messages.

Coworker: Yeah! Let's start.

40 commits later.

Me: Why is .idea folder in the repository?

Coworker: Sorry My Bad.

Me: 👿👿👿👿

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Yesterday I had my performance review discussion with my manager after about 6 months into the job, which is my first dev job. Before this, I had spent about 2 years in a support role after graduation, but always yearned to build something cool and be a full time developer. Hence I had made the lunge in spite of a pay cut into a development role.

For the past 6 months I was asked to develop a bunch of features on top of legacy code which is ~15 years old. I did my best and brought in the best ideas and practices onto the table and delivered on time. The features turned out great. I enjoyed working with the team and the team loved me back!

But at the back of my mind, I was hoping that I would get to work on something new and relevant. To quench this thirst, I used to spend my personal time on side projects.

The managers and the leads who have been observing me all along, told me yesterday that my manager got AMAZINGLY positive feedback from the leads and my teammates (who are like 10 years senior to me). Going forward, I get to work on any CRAZY idea and pick up any technology I like with the goal of revamping our product. Essentially I get to work on my side projects full time as long as it adds value to the company.

Ohhhhhh YEAH!

Wish me luck. 😎

Last year I signed in for a course called "Best Practices in Programming", and part of the course was to get the code of our current projects reviewed by a professional developer. I had a horribly written (out of inexperience) code in Python. The guy who had to review my code basically said I had no idea about coding but went on helping me a lot. Since then I started to learn some concepts of software engineering, how to code more efficiently, and so on and I've been much better ever since. So kudos to him for putting up with my spaghetti code and sending me in the right direction!

"...the way he has written the code, it feels nasty man. I would have done it this way..."

Fuck you and your feelings. If you think my code is bad, give justification for it. Explain the fucking reason. Stop saying it "feels" like a bad code.

Fucking tired of this mentality in most of the developers. Why is it that the moment you look at someone else's code, you feel like you would have written it better. Programming is problem solving. And you can solve a problem in couple of different way.

If the code is absolute shit, has followed no best practices then yeah, go ahead and call it a bad code. But just because you would have moved some lines here and there, that doesn't mean the other persons code is horrible.

Goddamit!

Does anyone know if there's a Bob Ross of development?

I feel like I just need to hear someone coding or talking best practices in a chilled out relaxing way to help me through the day.

So I spent 4-5 weeks explaining how shit the current code base was, implemented gulp tasks to lint js, CSS etc, written shed loads of coding standards and best practices to follow. At this point everyone was onboard with the changes and thought brilliant were going to start getting some good code coming out of this team.

I go on holiday for a week, come back and fucker has ignored the documentation disabled the linters in the gulp tasks and the code is back to square one SHIT!!

Plus everyone still committing to master!!!!

Why do I bother!!

I'm in that weird spot where the more I study programming, the more I realize I know next to nothing. I get pretty demotivated at times because it can be so overwhelming to study for hours, finally understand a topic... only to find out the next thing is even worse and there's literally thousands of things to learn, from languages themselves, to rules, best practices, paradigms and so on and so forth.

How do you guys deal with this? Do you even have the same problem?

You know what's more irritating than working with a partner who doesn't understand how to properly build an API?

Working with one who fully understands the best practices but doesn't give a shit to implement them until something breaks.

You guys made my whole day for the first time since I joined. (yes all of you!)

1) I had a 'fight' with a guy I'm making a startup with. Had to explain some of the story of my life, just to clarify that I'm not evil or generally unwilling to understand - regarding me, having the need to keep using practices

2) I've found that a whole niche-community of people seems to ignore the rest of the community and won't tag along. Having spent several months to be able to help, and receiving shit or absolutely nothing, for finally trying

3) Was in a bad mood the moment I woke up, because I fought with my girlfriend last night because she fails to communicate simple things and won't realise it.

Sorry for the bad punctuation, I tried and smartphones aren't a nice way to edit such things.

So my rant is basically a thank you! Not a rant.. But still, I think you people are the best for being so relatable and making me laugh, and feel like there's more of 'my kind'.

I also just fixed a bug in my app by (finally!) asking the framework maintainer what's up, and got a response which made no sense in a logical manner.. That's a rant for another day, I'll aggregate all the 0 fucks given, when I'm finally able to leave this thing behind, and give you a proper curse-filled shit stack of the nonsense I'm experiencing!

The bug would still live if I weren't so energized by devRant

EDIT: '!' != ','

!rant
Our lead dev in the company seems to be a smart guy who's sensitive about code quality and best practices. The current project I'm working on (I'm an intern) has really bad code quality but it's too big an application with a very important client so there's no scope of completely changing it. Today, he asked me to optimize some parts of the code and I happily sat down to do it. After a few hours of searching, profiling and debugging, I asked him about a particular recurring database query that seemed to be uneccesarilly strewn across the code.
Me: "I think it's copy pasted code from somewhere else. It's not very well done".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, the code may not the be really beautiful. It was done hurriedly by this certain inexperienced intern we had a few years back".
Me: "Oh, haha. That's bad".
Lead Dev: "Yeah, you know him. Have you heard of this guy called *mentions his own name with a grin*?"
Me: ...
Lead Dev: "Yeah, I didn't know much then. The code's bad. Optimize it however you like. Just test it properly"
Me: respect++;

Which one do you use?

So my boss booked me a spot at a conference about "the future of online payments" and I received an email with auto created account (there was no sign up) with a clear text password.

I'm feeling pretty confident that I can trust them to guide and advise me on best practices when it comes to handling sensitive information.

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

I don't think I could give the best advice on this since I don't follow all the best practices (lack of knowledge, mostly) but fuck it;

- learn how to use search engines. And no, not specifically Google because I don't want to drag kids into the use of mass surveillance networks and I neither want to promote them (even if they already use it).
- try not to give up too easily. This is one I'm still profiting from (I'm a stubborn motherfucker)
- start with open source technologies. Not just "because open source" but because open source, in general, gives one the ability to hack around and explore and learn more!
- Try to program securely and with privacy in mind (the less data you save, the less can be abused, compromised, leaked, etc)
- don't be afraid to ask questions
-enjoy it!

My code is always a battle between best practices and what I assume would be the most efficient way to do things

Sometimes dirty code is more efficient than clean code.

If features get dropped frequently and requirements change every few days, writing best-practices, tested code is wasted time. Learned that in my first job where I thought the other devs were all bad. Until I realized their bad code pays my salary, and my clean code takes more time to develop.

So.... We spend most our lives learning languages and methodologies and best practices and all that crap while depriving ourselves of sleep because the rules said if we did that we'd make something cool and have fun doing it...

But then *any company here* comes along and says make this shitty feature in *arbitrary time here* for our stupid *product here*.
You do it working overtime and sacrificing quality to have the client say afterwards that he wants something different (from his own specs).

And then the circle repeats...

I should consider a different profession...
Hey plants don't speak... Maybe I'll be a gardener!
Clip here clip there - done. I'll be a happy fucking script

yeah, i use the best security practices

PHP Best Practices

former boss wrote three cyber-defense books. had his "collections" team sending plaintext passwords to high-side clients over unsecured email

Had a job interview for a front end dev (Involving a technical test). After couple of days, recruiter says - Unfortunately they say that you are too focused on best practices so they want to pass.

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.

So I was reviewing my old code. Refactoring and improving the documentation.

This is a production app that is being used 24/7/365.

I see myself using "bar = foo" and there's even an explanation of what it does.
Apparently I resolved a relatively difficult Date object issue and had to use temporary variables.
Didn't know how to call them and ended up with these jewels.

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Best girl i've met.

I attended a CMS Conference last month(I don't use a CMS, i'm just interested with the topics about DevOps and UI/UX). I met this pretty lady ( I find her cute and awesome.) who's one of the speaker, she talked about design principles and applying it to BEM with SASS. After the talk, i asked her some questions about her dev't workflow like what tools she used and some best practices. Our conversation went well and exchange some of our knowledge and ideas also i introduced her to devrant (She's a wordpress user, i showed to her how the community hates WP, idk if she registered). After her talked we separated ways and ended seeing again after the conference as she's looking for a cab going to a mall (Same directions where i'm heading to), We talked again and decided to have dinner together. I felt like she's the best girl i met as she's into TV shows i like (Silicon Valley and Mr Robot). We added ourselves in FB and saying goodbye to each other. After a week or two, i just found out that she already into a relationship and it broke my heart.

I guess im back to the start, but i'm happy that i made a new friend.

Went to the ATM to get some cash.. entered an amount of 800 INR and to my surprise got an error saying "Your account does not have sufficient funds for this transaction" .. Instantly thought that my account has somehow been compromised.. checked the bank app and found out that I everything was normal..

As it turns out the ATM machine did not have 500 or 100 INR notes, thus it could not dispense my requested amount..

Now that's what we call a "Good" error handling..

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

I seear man fucking shit php devs make it hard for people to appreciate the language.
To start, i don't think there is anything wrong with php. As a language I know damn near all of its pitfalls and have successfully deployed huge applications with minimal fuss.

The thing is...this shit seems to happen only when I AM THE MOTHERFUCKER THAT DOES IT

In any other scenario i am constantly cursing the original author under my fucking breath hoping that they choke on their own dicks. Fucking cunts.

Really man, some of the fucking code i have seen. This shit is dangerous as fuck and i can't believe that in 2019 motherfuckers would not have the decency to google for best fucking practices or learn it from a fucking book and shit.

Writing proper php code is not that fucking hard people, every fucking update to the language, every fucking tool that comes out is for the betterment of it.
Guess proper oop or functional paradigms are too complex for some dickheads. Hell, not even top to bottom procedural code.

Fuck me. Good thing is, boss is happy, the entire faculty is happy, the board is happy. Everyone is motherfucking happy.

Dez negroids better remember this shit cuz I just asked for a $20k raise.

I got a raise literally every time i ask for one so this one better make the cut.

Fuck shit php developers man. Y'all don't deserve the language, y'all make the language look bad, y'all make the community look bad.

Fuck you, die and eat a dick. Do all that shit in whatever order you prefer.

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

Vendor: We are very professional and follow best practices, we know what we are doing. You should trust us.

Also Vendor 5 mins later: DB passwords, API keys and SSH keys in repo. AWS Access Keys shared in screenshots in email.

Me: 😭

Looking for job opportunities, one grabbed my attention and I decided to apply. First, I had to fill a form with 40 questions, explaining and justifying development processes, best practices and overall knowledge. Ok, no problem. Form submitted, and I see a step 2. Now I have to build a single page site from scratch, and send another form with code, link, and more justifications regarding development. After that, my application will be sent.

Then I found this observation, saying the position was for a freelancer, that will receive work occasionally. Not a full time position as I thought.

Sometimes cleaning bathrooms sounds a better option.

Today I decided that I will quit my internship.
So mamy things are mismanaged and my supervisor avoids helping me. I'm not gonna even rant about shitty coding practices, or rather, lack of them.

Now out of 10 ppl team I'm sitting alone in the office because everybody, apart from me, can work from home. When I asked why do I have stay in the office - this is to provide me the best placement experience (wtf). So I sit here, knowing that even if I send an email with a technical questions, I will not get an answer. Atm, can't even give a fuck about trying to be productive. I'm so tired with these fake smily faces that cannot manage a single intern but expect me to do everything without any help.

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

Be skeptical of best practices. "Best" comes with assumptions, which may not apply to you.

It's starting again. I can feel it.

You had a decent job, but you had to think otherwise. Then you had to go to that coffee shop tell some people you're the fucking bee's knees, didn't you?

Well, you know that's how the band plays.

Yeah, but now you'll have to live up to the hype, my friend. And you know pretty well that the pocketknife on your belt won't cut it anymore.

I can always learn as I go...

Sure you can. Except this time stakes are higher. They'll be expecting you to deliver on all your bloody greatness. They'll be relying on you. Not only them, but also the person who chose to be with you. And you know you're not enough, for neither of them. Now you'll fuck it up and let all those people down.

But I could build things little by little, lay out a solid groundwork and build up from that. Just like that other time when...

Of course you can. But can you make beautiful sparkly things? Can you make them sexy?

No... But I can make them resilient. I can follow best practices and intelligent design patterns.

Right. Cause design patterns win contests and prizes. Sure.

Well, it'll make things work better. And then when someone else comes along...

They'll say your work smells and let everybody know how it should've been done, because they need to prove themselves. You know that's what people do.

But that's just not fair! Solid work is solid work!

And a fraud is still a fraud. And that's what you are.

When UserID is an int(3) in one table, and then text(10) in another. And then the monent you see that the Username field is stored in both tables ......🖕🖕🖕🖕

Who dafuq wrote this crap?!?!?!?

Friend asked if I have ever built authentication using PHP and SQL...

Feel like sending links for them to research how instead of having me build it for them.

Teach a man to fish...?

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

The guy who became my manager just pushes to the prod branch.

On a repo where another team clearly set up development and production branches.

This guy has been pushing code like crazy and I always wanted to take my time setting things up properly in our team: TDD, CI/CD, etc.

Because he pushed so much he became my manager and I was seen as unproductive.

Data Science and software development best practices just dont coexist it seems.

Yeah yeah, it's up to me to start introducing good practices, but atm "getting it done" takes priority over the real based shit.

Overworked team spends 2 months hacking together a Codecademy clone in record time: avoiding best practices, conflating paradigms, throwing shit at the wall until it stuck.

But today I submit a small UI fix that used a table instead of `display: table`...

*Senior Dev:* Ah yes, we need to put try-catch in every function to handle errors and Logger.Log() at the beginning.
*Me:* Is not better to define a global error handler and use the stacktrace instead of doing all that?
*Senior Dev*: ...
*Senior Dev*: Is a rule here, do what I'm telling you.

To all the data engineers in here: WTF is going on in your field?

I've worked closely with a dozen data engineers in the last 5 years (and talked to friends and internet strangers about this and get similiar responses), mine if them seem to know how to use a computer!

They don't understand git, ORMs, best practices, how to use a terminal, DAGs (important for using modern ETL scheduling tools like airflow and prefext), etc

Guys with 10 years of experience on their resume and they can't wrap a model into a flask app with 1 endpoint. They'll reference local files on their machine in w jupyter notebook and are shocked it won't work on other computers!

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!

So, we’ve a small UK based dev team, we follow good practices and get good results. But ‘they’ want to deploy quicker (it was suggested we skip the test phases...) but don’t want to invest in more staff.
So their suggestion is to outsource development to Bangladesh and have us in-house devs work on discovery and innovation.
I’m uncomfortable with this as it feels they are thinking they can get quicker and cheaper dev done abroad (which I hate as it feels disrespectful to my fellow dev brothers n’ sisters).
Also disjointed as in my experience planning and dev’ing work best when you can talk face-to-face.
Thoughts?

Expert: "The core problem with passwords is that they reside on a server."

I suppose that's true, but only if you're a complete moron. Store a hash of a password, and users can authenticate against it with a password that doesn't get logged. This is technology that's been around for over fifty years. If you're storing passwords on a server, you deserve whatever trouble you get.

> asks for better pay
> starts trying to evaluate the quality of our efforts
> complains about doing things that are not good in the long run
> spends time mastering best practices
> unemployed

Vendor we('re forced to) work with, as we share a client. This is in their stylesheet. Fuck SEO best practices, amirite?! 😒

I’ve been at this job 4 months and I feel like I’ve been here long enough to make an accurate opinion of it. From day one I have not felt welcomed. There is no communication within the team.. none of my questions are ever answered.. and when I do ask questions I get snarky answers. I don’t expect my hand to be held, but as someone who is new, I’d like you to give me guidance. Especially since the code is mostly legacy and no one else on the team seems to know anything about anything.

Oh and there are not daily stand ups, project managers, or direction in the tickets themselves.

I guess I should have expected this on the first day when I asked for a SIP or documentation on how to get my environment setup I was practically laughed out of the office and then had the nerve to ask me why it took me the entire day to get 5 environments up and running.. not giving me the custom mappings or the global UDFs.

Today was my last straw.. when I asked a question in three different forms of communication on multiple different channels and was never given an answer.. and then was asked why I did something the way I did instead of doing it the way they wanted me to.

I think the saddest thing is that I felt tricked into this. I was told this position was going to be one way but ended up being something else. I was excited to share my knowledge and best practices to the team. Instead, I’m an outcast and get only be negativity and excuses when I politely bring up suggestions.

I no longer have the will to code here.

Software development best practices: decouple your code

Apple, on applying a bold text style: Nah.

I don't seem to understand why so many developers nowadays are focused on learning newer frameworks rather than focusing on best practices and learning how to code better.

"Hey I learnt React today, we should totally switch to it because it's so amazing"

> mfw the same guy doesn't even know how to follow coding styles, write good code that scales or document his code.

I think some people need to take a step back and focus on the more vital tasks of writing good code to begin with rather than getting so excited about every new thing that surfaces. It's annoying as fuck to deal with some of these people who you have to work alongside and be able to read their loopy shit code and all they are doing in their time is refreshing hackernews.

(As a freelancer I was asked to do a couple of tasks on legacy code)

Let’s check this code, how bad can it be?

- all of the following: unreadable mess, no auto linting

- tests: some are there cause there’s not enough automation, others are poorly named
- frontend: somehow a genius made a react component for every variable in the store which only passes the variable to the child (wtf)
- backend: death by best practices
- ci/cd: “we have it but it’s broken”

Let’s fucking goooo 😎

Diagnosis: my therapist is getting rich
Chances to not cry tonight: close to zero

At least they pay well 🤷‍♂️

I'm so fed up of this shitty ultra-ortodox industry

I've worked on many different projects, been in many different teams. It's an ever changing industry, but, surprisingly, it's so orthodox. Dev industry nowadays have some rules, that everybody adopts them as "best practices". You have to work on pull requests, and several of your teammates have to review your shit (as if they have nothing better to do).
I'm sick of people using fucking DTOs in shitty frameworks like Laravel. Using DTOs in Laravel is like putting mustard in a fucking chocolate cake.
I'm so fed up of SPAs and node.js. I've yet so see a single SPA that handles jwt tokens correctly. I'm tired of spending hours and hours, days and days, struggling with thousandls of layers of abstractions instead of being productive and getting the shit done.
Because end customers don't give a shit about your "best practices": They have a problem and you are getting paid for it to be solved, not for spending hours and hours struggling with stupid Javascript and its crazy async nature and their crappy libraries.

Damnit. I say. Now. I now feel better. Thanks for listening :)

What was your most disappointing moment as a software developer?

Mine was the realization that when you're working for someone, all they want to see is the final product. The people paying you don't give a shit whether you put your braces on a new line, your domain model doesn't call a database directly or if you're applying the best practices. Your teammates do, but the people paying you don't.

People hire you to get the job done, and that job is to solve a problem for someone. Not in the way that's best for you, but in the most effective way for them. Since I realized this, I lost some pride in my work.

<rant>
Don't fucking tell me to move business logic from the service to the controller. Don't fucking tell me it will enable an "event driven architecture." Don't fucking use Angular for this project if you're just gonna shit on best practices and write convoluted, messy, inconsistent code and force your coworkers to do the same!
</rant>

I've been been in consulting doing systems implementations for about a decade. I just started a new e-commerce project with perhaps the most agreeable client I've ever encountered - in fact they're extremely eager to make my job easier. Just today one of the stakeholders, completely seriously, uttered the phrase "maybe we don't need to care about IE".

After ten years living thru every client cliche imaginable over and over again I now find I don't know how to trust. Their acceptance of best practices and my recommendations is almost unnerving...

browsed LinkedIn articles, saw one about "good qualities of WordPress Developer", first bullet point is "following coding best practices" is it just me or that is one of the main things wrong with WP

Trying to be agile and employ modern best practices in a decades old traditional super-corp.

I feel like head butting a large nail

I am driven by my love for this industry and wanting to do everything to the best of my ability.

Being a strong advocate for quality i am always on the look put for new practices and finding new ways to improve my code.

If you consider a project 'done' then you gave up on it.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

I'll just start off with how I really feel. Fuck big corporations with their career robots and retarded practices!
Now for a story. So I work remotely for most of the time nowadays, since my company has as clients big corporations. Used to be embedded with said clients, but it became kind of painful to work with them all so I asked to be reassigned to a remote position.
Now for the retarded part: The fucking Klingons I'm working with have two tiers to their VPN, but won't let me have the full version because it would be too fucking expensive. I checked and it's fucking 50 bucks per year difference.
So for that the Klingons are making me code through a remote connection that has a "best effort" priority.
Fuck.
Anyway after 3 weeks of writing code at a 400-600ms latency I finally snap.
I try to use a proxy and it. I write one myself, gets balcklisted in 2 days.
After about another week of writing code through a fuck straw I start working on node socket with 2 clients and a server that encrypts the send data, and syncs 2 folders between my workstation and the remote one.
It's been a month now and it is still working. It's not perfect, but I can at least write code without lag.

Question for you peeps: What shenanigans have you pulled to bypass shit like this?

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

My man said "What should I return if the True/False field is left blank?"

WHY WOULD A BOOLEAN BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN TRUE OR FALSE???!!!

I'm gonna have an aneurysm. I shouldn't be educating people on best practices for something that's already been written about time and time again. RESTful philosophy has been documented so much, and all it takes is a quick google search, but noooo! I have to take time out of my day as if I'm a regular old stakeholder to explain that I want the exact thing that I sent in an email two weeks ago. Amazing.

Does anyone get the feeling that as they become more senior, they care less about meeting "best practices" and more of just "good enough"?

Best practices being everything in those books about TDD, unit testing, design patterns, design artifacts.

Good enough: enough so it won't blow up in prod, some tests but not 80-90%, some docs. Basically not like those public docs, open source projects/frameworks where function is covered

When I first started professionally, I was all about efficiency, good design, reducing technical debt, clean code.

But now, I look at problems and instinctively I may make these decisions but I don't really think about it much. First goal is to just get something working, clean it up later... Maybe.

So for almost all of my c++ assignments I've recieved various emails from the instructor about things like "incorrect header guard" and "library inclusions out of order".

The first being that I didn't include the namespace inside of the guard (I did "FILENAME_H" instead of "NAMESPACE_FILENAME_H")

The second is that I accidentally included header files from my project before any of the standard libraries. This one wasn't even intentional, it was caused by vscode when it formatted/prettified the file.
EX:
#include "test.h"
#include <iostream>

In my opinion these seem pretty nitpicky and, especially that first one, appear to be more like naming conventions or best practices than something to deduct marks for.

On the flip side though I did accidentally store a couple functions in the global namespace which I understand isn't particularly safe. I also made a couple one line conditional statements that simply never evaluate to true, but I didn't think this was a huge deal.

I don't normally code in any of the c languages outside of college so I'm not sure how important these are to actually follow. I've apparently been deducted an entire 10 percent off the assignment because of the head guard. I know that every professor has different criteria for deducting marks, but even this seemed rather unnecessary.

What does everyone think?

!rant
if you're someone who grades code, fuck you, you probably suck. Turned in a final project for this gis software construction class as a part of my master's degree (this class was fuck all easy, I had two weeks for each project, each of them took me two days). We had to pick the last project, so I submitted final project proposal that performs a two-sample KS test on some point data. Not complex, but it sounds fancy, project accepted. Easy money.

I write the thing and finish it, it works, but it doesn't have a visualization and that makes the results seem pretty lame, even though its fully functional. SO I GO OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY to add a matplotlib chart of the distribution. To do that, at the very bottom of the workflow, I define a function to chart it out because it made the code way more readable. Reminder, I didn't have to do this, it was extra work to make my code more functional.

Then, this motherfucker takes points off because I didn't define the function at the very beginning of the code... THE FUCK, DUDE? But, noobrants, it's "considered best prac--" nope, fuck you, okay? This class was so shit, not once was code style addressed in a lesson or put on any rubric - they didn't give a shit what it looked like - in fact, the whole class only used arcpy (and the csv mod once), they didn't teach us shit about anything except how to write geoprocessing scripts (in other words, how to read arcGIS docs about arcpy) and encouraged us to write in fucking pythonwin. And now, when the class is fucking over, you decide to just randomly toss this shit in, like it was a specific expectation this whole time? AND you do this when someone has gone out of their way to add functionality? Why punish someone who does extra work because that extra work isn't perfect? Literally, my grade would have been better without the visualization.

I'm not even mad at my grade - it was fine - I just hate inconsistency in grading practices and the random raising and lowering of expectations depending on how some grader's coffee tasted that morning. I also hate punishing people for doing more - it's this kind of shit that makes people A) wanna rip their eyeballs out, and B) never do anything more than the basic minimum expectation to avoid extra unwanted attention. If you want your coders to step up and actually put work in to make things the best they can be, yell at a grader to reward extra work and not punish it.

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

Whelp. I started making a very simple website with a single-page design, which I intended to use for managing my own personal knowledge on a particular subject matter, with some basic categorization features and a simple rich text editor for entering data. Partly as an exercise in web development, and partly due to not being happy with existing options out there. All was going well...

...and then feature creep happened. Now I have implemented support for multiple users with different access levels; user profiles; encrypted login system (and encrypted cookies that contain no sensitive data lol) and session handling according to (perceived) best practices; secure password recovery; user-management interface for admins; public, private and group-based sections with multiple categories and posts in each category that can be sorted by sort order value or drag and drop; custom user-created groups where they can give other users access to their sections; notifications; context menus for everything; post & user flagging system, moderation queue and support system; post revisions with comparison between different revisions; support for mobile devices and touch/swipe gestures to open/close menus or navigate between posts; easily extendible css themes with two different dark themes and one ugly as heck light theme; lazy loading of images in posts that won't load until you actually open them; auto-saving of posts in case of browser crash or accidental navigation away from page; plus various other small stuff like syntax highlighting for code, internal post linking, favouriting of posts, free-text filter, no-javascript mode, invitation system, secure (yeah right) image uploading, post-locking...

On my TODO-list: Comment and/or upvote system, spoiler tag, GDPR compliance (if I ever launch it haha), data-limits, a simple user action log for admins/moderators, overall improved security measures, refactor various controllers, clean up the code...

It STILL uses a single-page design, and the amount of feature requests (and bugs) added to my Trello board increases exponentially with every passing week. No other living person has seen the website yet, and at the pace I'm going, humanity will have gone through at least one major extinction event before I consider it "done" enough to show anyone.

help

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...

!dev
EA can suck my inches. Fucking deprecated and greedy business practices. Now I'm fucking told me to play the game later, because "too many computers have accessed this accounts version of a shitty game that crashed my pc 3 times. Please try again later."

Stupid cunts, have you ever heard of a vpn? Or maybe listened to the people complaining about this issue since 2017. On top of that you apparently rendered geforce now useless with this error.

Good fucking lord, I haven't even mentioned origin, the big pile of shit, yet. The download functionality you praise like God's cum doesn't even hold out half an hour before it freezes, together while the whole UI. You cannot like your games with a steam account, so you'd have to pay for a game you already own.

...And a whole lot of other issues I probably haven't encountered yet.

It's more lucrative to sell this shitty account and then buy the fucking game I want to play on steam. I have a feeling that would be about the best option I have.

I'm tired of this shit, I just wanna play some games with friends. I did not play to be spit on my face by some corporate wankers

Ok, here goes...

I was once asked to evaluate upgrade options for an online shop platform.

The thing was built on Zend 1, but that's not the problem.

The geniuses that worked on it before didn't have any clue about best practices, framework convention, modular thinking, testing, security issues...nothing!

There were some instances when querying was done using a rudimentary excuse for a model layer. Other times, they would just use raw queries and just ignore the previous method. Sometimes the database calls were made in strange function calls inside randomly loaded PHP files from different folders from all over the place. Sometimes they used JOINs to get the data from multiple tables, sometimes they would do a bunch of single table queries and just loop every data set to format it using multiple for loops.

And, best of all, there were some parts of the app that would just ignore any ideea of frameworks, conventions and all that and would be just a huge PHP file full of spagetti code just spalshed around, sometimes with no apparent logic to it. Queries, processing, HTML...everything crammed in one file...

The most amazing thing was that this code base somehow managed to function in production for more than 5 years and people actualy used it...

Imagine the reaction I got from the client the moment I said we should burn it to the ground and rebuild the whole thing from scratch...

Good thing my boss trusted me and backed me up (he is a great guy by the way) and we never had to go along with that Frankenstein monster...

i think formal education is the best, because it teaches good practices and all the whys of programming. it requires a lot of discipline and effort, but actually sitting down and studying theory is good for us

I didn’t turn down a dev freelance project when the client decided against going with best practices because the solution I offered was a well-established design pattern but created a need for a financial management change she didn’t like. I stupidly built what she asked for. It worked fine in the 3rd party vendor test environment but failed on production. After hours of analysis of code to ensure no changes happened to my source during test->prod deployment, and the vendor denying they had config differences between them, and the client refusing to pay, all I could do was abandon the project.

Me: The dev agency didn’t follow best practices. They only implemented front end validation on the form. The form submits to a public endpoint, so bots don’t have to go through our site to submit the form. That’s why our database is still filled with $1 donation transactions. I honestly recommend telling this to the dev agency and request that you not be charged for the extra work needed to do this right.

Manager: They charge $95/hr and they’re billing for 8 hours already.

[Aside: The agency’s task was to implement a $10 minimum on the form, do some text changes, and deploy.]

Me: I would expect work to be done according to accepted best practices. It’s really a half done job.

Manager: But they were very helpful when we had that payment processing emergency. They stayed late to help us. We shouldn’t push this in case we need their help again. Can you do the backend validation? [We are in US and agency is in Lithuania.]

Me: 🤬😩😑🤐[To myself: This wouldn’t have happened if the fundraising team hadn’t panicked and would only wait until I came back from my one day of PTO.]

4 months into the journey at an ambitious streaming startup we, a team of 10 engineers (primarily full stack), sets up a tiny and performant express.js api setup.
We document plans for improving the maintainability, including outlining specific practices (not very different from general node best practices) that need to be followed for all new development.

Enter a new engineering manager (dedicated backend manager), henceforth referred to as S, with a rat face and brain that belongs in a rat hole.

Week 1:
S: let's push this new feature out asap
Dev: it'll need a couple of weeks to get done right
S: let's push out a functional version tomorrow, and revamp in the next iteration
Dev: ... (long pause) there's documented practices specifically directing against this
S: can you not do it by tomorrow
Dev: not if it needs to be done right
S: all you need to do is.. (simplifies changes spanning 5 modules into a 3 line summary)
Dev: yes, (outlines how each changes chains into the others, and how to keep the development maintainable for atleast a few months)
S: (interrupts every sentence saying "yes dev, I understand, yes yes")
Dev: could you please tell me how you expect me to connect (outlines two modules that would fail unless developed as standalone services)
S: Yes dev, I understand, yes yes. I don't have much experience with Node.js, so I can't tell you that.

Dev:
<_<
>_>
O_<

Our.. entire.. backend.. stack.. is.. Node. (Months of motivation, cultivated through hard work over late nights, dies inside)

I need a J and some sleep.

Had a new co-worker I was responsible for training. I am several years his junior, but he is working with a new language/framework I'm fluent in. Day 4 into training, he walks into my cubicle, sidles up next to me, I look up at him, he farts loudly, then (without seeming to realize what he's done) he proceeds to launch into a long-winded question about coding best practices.

If this were an isolated incident, I'd have written it off, but the dude did it again when he came to my desk and asked me to open a jar of pickles for him, and many times over during casual conversation.

isRant = true

Am I the only one who has to deal with an annoying coworker who has the urge to take every conversation into an argument to prove himself smarter than everyone in the team? A person who has to contradict every time with rest of the people just to prove himself smarter and different.

Gets so annoying sometimes that I stop answering him right away.

To add to this he is the person from our dev team who has to prove that he codes the fastest and want to get it deployed ASAP. Does not follows best practices and disregards and design patterns. Would argue for hours on his code with the peer reviewer.

Every one hates him for this and he things he is the dev rockstar

We were documenting a feature which has system wide affect. We’ll be delivering it to customer on Monday.

So we’ve asked the colleague who worked on it about how it works and asked few follow up questions that arise during the documenting. All were good.

Comes Friday when I had a question as some things didn’t add up and I checked the source. To my surprise the very core operation colleague explained us works in exact opposite way. I kid you not in %50 percent of the documentation we ramble about why it was implemented this way since it is faster/safer best practices bla bla.

Moreover we’ve already had some exchange with the customer and we informed(misinformed) them about this core operation...

Also changing the behavior will reduce the overall speed as it will cause extra branchings. Other option is to rewrite the documentation and inform(re-convince) the customer. If it was me I wouldn’t trust us anymore but we’ll see.

I really don’t know what to say about this fucker why would you say something if you’re not sure of it or why the fuck you didn’t confirm in the last 3 weeks....

Anyway we have a meeting on Monday morning to discuss how to proceed, that’s gonna be fun!

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

Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.

Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.

One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.

At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"

And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.

But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?

I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.

What do y'all ninjas think?

I know its been quite a while since ive posted last but it is safe to say that i am back! And boy do i have some stuff to bitch about.

This semester, Im taking mobile app development as a class. I chose to take this class over the introductory c# class, so that i wouldn't need to work with Windows or really do anything else to touch Windows. Well the joke is on me. Here i was thinking that we would be using a bit of Java from time to time while only really learning best practices and concepts.
Never did i think that this class's curriculum would be entirely based off of Xamarin.
Seeing as I need either this class or the two c# classes to graduate, I had to bite the bullet and just accept that my semester would be full of irritation during this class.
Its been about seven weeks in, and i have turned in 8 assignments.
All 8 of those assignments have been Windows Form Applications doing simple shit like dividing two numbers.
We have not made anything for multiple devices. We have not made anything for even one mobile device. We have not even discussed how to do this in the class.
This wouldnt bother me so much since these are typically easy programs that take about 30 minutes to make and test and submit for grading. It does insanely bother me, however, that it takes Windows so FUCKING LONG to boot, or when it freezes every 2 minutes because i clicked into another program, or it just HANGS ON THE UPDATING SCREEN AT 36% FOR THREE DAYS, or when it took 4 different reinstallations of Visual Studio 2017 before i could actually open without an error code.

College, Ive learned, tests my patience way more than it has ever tested my knowledge.

I was in Singapore last week for a conference. The speaker, who I met a long time ago and was our contact at Meta/Facebook, was promoting FB/Instagram reels and even gave pointers on best practices when posting reels.

She was one of the 11,000 employees that Meta let go one week later. Ouch.

I am preparing for my exam in a software engineering course, where we discuss best practices for programming, testing methodologies and project management.
One of the topics is CMMI, and basically it states that organizations with mature development processes can produce exceptional software even if the teams involved are average.
Do you really think an efficient process can make up for lack of brilliance/ingenuity among the devs?

Just because you have no idea what you are doing does not make you an artist.

So can we please treat software development as engineering?

I get that in software there are a lot of unknowns and you won't always find best practices, especially if you want to be a pioneer on the bleeding edge.

Yet maybe that issue you were trying to solve with your hackish -- I mean artfully -- solution is a lack of understanding of the basic technology?

If you want to do art, try poetry.

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

When writing code that has to be evaluated by a college prof, redirect all the best practices to /dev/null

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

Sysadmin's nemesis: a DBA. Especially an oracle DBA. There's no other kind of tech worker I've seen who's more opposed to best practices.

How about for devs?

Comment on a code review:
How does this relate to the task?
Me:
Most of the changes have nothing to do with the task, but half of the code & build system was either wrong, broken or not following best practices. This particular change is because something was broken.

Pointers like this:
char* string;

Or like this:
char *string;

?

We rewrote the whole thing, except for iFraming some old pages in. We had to, the system was fucking awful and couldn't cope with any of the new mission critical requirements.

Client didn't understand the scope. Our project leader somehow snuck it in and we worked on it for months. We were sure we'd be kicked off the whole project... Somehow things didn't crash and burn. How it didn't blow up defies rational thought and the laws of physics. The new system worked, the client was happy, and boss made a lot of money.

Lead dev worked weekends for what feels like an eternity, it really was his baby and no one else on our company could have done it. It's where I finally learned how to do things the proper way; DDD, unit testing and TDD, architecture, building strong components in front-end, you name it. Before that I had a great nose for code smells and how not to do stuff, but now I got to see a proper system for the first time. It was glorious.

Then lead dev left and the system degraded quite a bit because new team didn't keep to the architectural patterns or general best practices. But we had a good run.

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

I was once handed a very old PHP project that I had to make some changes to. I thought it would be a piece of cake. But the moment I looked at the code, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. It was so poorly written, it took me hours to figure out what was actually going on. Now these were the times when I was already quite disturbed mentally and emotionally, and this shitty PHP code only made it worse. At one point, I was like, fuck this shit I'm gonna quit this job.

Thankfully, the client soon emailed that the requested changes weren't needed anymore.

I personally have nothing against PHP. I have created some amazing stuff with it. But it's the programmers that don't follow the best practices that piss me off. I mean, how fucking hard can it be to write clean code. You might save your time today by taking shortcuts but you'll make life hell for the people who might have to maintain your code in the future.

I feel like being a doctor is like being a contract dev. You're thrown into a bad situation, you know the stack but you don't know the project history, best practices aren't followed, and the only dev is also the primary stakeholder who learned everything he knows from w3schools.

For the people working on small startups:

How do you keep updated on best practices, engineering, and all that when you're 24/7 focused on the startup (implementing, testing, fixing stuff)?

I feel like I love doing things the best way, but we always go with the "do fast, break fast" and it always feels like a mess because the engineering is done after a really small MVP is done (and after a long time usually).

I was hoping to be able to at least do a really small engineering part *before* starting anything new, but CEO always wants stuff done *yesterday*. But for this I think I should be reading more, and playing around with new patterns and all that, so at least I know out of the box what would be a good thing to start with and not having to change the entire project/script from scratch.

I do not think that GoTo is bad. It can lead to hellish code but if you don't misuse it - it can be extremely useful.

I love Android development, but I HATE make individual strings for each word in my apps. It's so tedious! There's gotta be a better way than telling myself, "Oh crap you better be a good boy and use Google's 'best practices' and not hardcode all your strings. Who knows you might make this app translatable in Portuguese someday and it'll be easy then!". I HATE it!!

So i informed my intent to leave the job in few months in pursuit of learning something new in tech. Boss is trying to convince me to not leave and said i should consider learning it after work hours. In fact, in his opinion, the best way to learn is just going ahead and learning it while doing it in the project ( which usually has impossible deadline and fugly code by colleagues who never thinks of good coding practices when typing their shit ).

Well guess what boss, I don't want to just live a life staring at monitor all day. I don't want to kill my eyes either.

Following his advise and not quitting would mean living a slave life.

I have other plans actually. Like being self employed and traveling the world which would be impossible if i follow the routine life.

Fun fact: he claimed he made an AI car back in 90s!

He also thinks I can't sense BS!😏

My senior colleague recently said "Don't go around asking for best practices, it's a waste of time! Just try stuff until it works and commit it".

We were talking about writing code in a new language.

Just because it's popular, doesn't mean it's good.

An overengineered solution can usually be simplified without breaking anything important. An oversimplified solution can rarely be upgraded without major breaking changes.

Not everything needs to follow the "best practices" - if it's not a part of the core functionality, diminishing returns often kick in quite fast.

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???

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

Have a question about my career:

So far my career out of uni has been like this:

8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.

12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.

3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.

Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.

In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.

I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.

Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.

I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.

Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?

I had mentioned before I got offered a new role, with 50% increase.

I wasn’t expecting my current employer to counter, but they suddenly shat themselves and basically matched the salary, and offered promotion to software developer (sans junior). They acknowledge my role within the company is only increasing in responsibility and so far I have exceeded expectations. Its a nice response to have from them, although I do wonder how long it might have taken without the panic.

The new company have counter-countered, promising to raise salary by a further 20% of total, within the first 6 months, provided I learn React reasonably quickly (about a month), integrate with the team and start to take on my roles within the Agile set relatively independently (3-6 months). They also don’t bother with the junior role title at these pay bandings.

I currently get about half an hour a week with my lead dev on sticking issues. In this new team, I would be one of ten javascripters, working towards best practices, TDD etc. This is absolutely the realm I want to specialise in, at the first stage of my career.

I said I would stay with my current employer, before the counter counter move. Now I am full of doubt.

Has anyone landed in teams like this, only to find they didn’t offer increased learning at all? If that was a high risk for me, I wouldnt take it, despite the offer of more cash. I’d sooner get more skilled in the stuff I have been working in at my current role.

Pretty amazing how much amazing life experiences can cause anxiety. Never been in the middle of a bidding war before...

* Start maintaining/upgrading new project at work
* Read book on best practices for the framework
* quickly realise all the "don't do this" parts of the examples in the book is EXACTLY how everything in the project is done
* cry self to sleep

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.

Best coding practices and tips

Do, as many of you fellow developers, I have a social pressure to do something with my life over the weekends, instead of geeking out or reading new best practices ..

So I finally decided to go see the Irish Curragh regatta organized by the Irish in Barcelona association ..

Nice and sunny Barcelona, besides the sea ..

Came home after three hours with a sun stroke, lobster face, completely blind despite the sun glasses, and with a terrible dizziness .. on my bike!

And they wonder why we spend time with our computers at home ..

So, we have a chat AIs that can do some basic code regurgitation and can assemble some really basic programs.

What are the chances that business rules and best practices are actually simpler in concept? Could we create an AI that can actually replace managers?

We have heard of people automating a lot of management tasks on this platform. The next step is replacing leads/managers.

I had this amazing boss. He had 25 years of experience in the sector covered by our software, an ERP. He knew how to be a programmer, a boss, a sales manager, a support person.
I learned most of the best practices from him: do not shout in the office, it makes impossible to work. Don't hide something to your coworkers, nobody was trusting him. Be clear with your clients, his subtle mind tricks pissed off a lot of clients. Your client needs to see an economic advantage in your offers, trying to sell gold priced shit is not a good way to stay in the market. The list could go on and on and on.

I learned what happens when you do everything in the wrong way, and I will never forget.

First rant that I really want to get out of my chest!

Never hated a job as much as this one. Haven’t done any development/programming related work since I joined. I have been mostly configuring Linux systems for IoT devices. When I get stuck at an issue, it takes me many frustrating nights to figure it out because no one on the team wants to deal with Linux shit… they’d rather be doing real development work (someone actually stated this!). There’s no one else on the team that knows Linux. Even the manager that was supposedly a Linux fanatic can’t even answer some of my questions and if they do, it’s the wrong fucking answer. Joined the company because they sold it as startup team with big money backing. Was excited to learn new technologies, new best software engineering practices, add new programming languages to my resume. But nope, been stuck at configuring Linux systems. At one point I was just pumping out updated Linux images with our updated application for a month straight. I was so excited when a development task was assigned to me a couple weeks back, but guess what?! There were Linux configuration tasks that no one knows how to do or don’t want to look at it, so my one and only fucking development work was swapped out!

And the funny thing is, I barely had any Linux experience when I joined. Why the fuck was I hired?

Man, I even bought books related to Linux programming (application and kernel) before I joined. Those books barely have a crease in them. What a waste.

Now in my free time, I’ve been learning new technologies on my own. Doing my own projects. But damn, I lose a lot of family time. Sorry wifey, I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to you!

But who knows, maybe this experience will have a silver lining in the end.

Thanks for reading :)

Does someone know a site where i can get professional level help/guides/tutorials with system architecture questions? Like best practices for implementing common features? (Something like stackoverflow but where u actually get an answer instead of insults)

Googling for tutorials gives very basic/demo level results that might not be great for scale/security in prod env

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.

Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.

A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.

So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.

This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.

Hi all! I am an iOS developer and I've been using Firebase as my 'online storage'. I want to be a more full stack dev and creating my own APIs. I want to start to learn Java or .NET APIs (uuh an iOS dev speaking about .NET :P). Anyone that can recommend good courses or tutorials and best practices? I have been learning Java and .NET in college, but that is about 4 years sgo.. Thanks in advance!

Questions/best practises for git?

For example:
- use present tense in commit messages. (why though?)

A friend of mine also starts his commit messages with either [Task] or [Cleanup]. Useful for finding Commits in Gitlab etc, because only the first line is shown from the message.

Also, one teacher recommended the usage of branches and the other didn't because of alot of potential merge conflicts when working in a Team or a larger Collaboration. What are your thoughts?

Sorry for the messy post, have a hangover

So we have a confluence page all about best practices (there’s not even a lot in it) but when you check the repository, most rules are not followed 😭

Rant portion:

Fuck me, there's not a ton of great resources for Lua. I have the book, and it's actually fucking incredible, but as soon as I have a question which I would usually Google, either it's a SO question that almost hits the mark (but absolutely does not answer my initial question) or a mailing list that DOES answer my question but holy FUCK it's difficult to read!

I 100% recommend the Lua book, though. It's remarkably helpful and covers just about every little detail of the language and it's corresponding c API, and even some of how Lua works behind the scenes.

Non-rant portion:

Finished up the first version of my library and now I'm binding it to Lua and this time around I'm using all the best practices including setting and checking metatables so that Lua can't segfault. It's going great, I properly learned about the Lua stack, and I feel good. Cross-platform double-buffered command line via a scripting language... What a way to enter 2020. Everything went so smooth that I got to 3am before I realized what even happened.

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

I am not sure if this is the best place for it, but let's go:

I am 35 years old and I always worked in the localization industry. I really love to code and I always developed small tools and scripts to help me and others at work, but now the company is going bad and it has the chance to close.

I was reckon if it would be a good idea to give development a try, besides my age and the lack of experience in a real development place. I am not even sure if I use programming good practices, as I always developed by myself.

Do you have any opinion about it?

Thank you so much!

How do you guys cope with being a junior dev and constantly receiving criticism about your work from your team leader?
I started working as a developer quite late: I did go to college in my early years but I was lazy at the time, so I didn't complete it. So I worked about ten years in a totally different industry, but I always wanted to go back to being a developer.
I've managed to do it when I was 34: I was a web developer in a small company and I was pretty much the only dev, except for an older dude who only knew Visual Basic 6 and kept programming things with it (in 2020ish!). In those years I always felt like a was way ahead of my colleague, and my efforts to apply best practices were not so welcome.
I eventually got tired of that situation, because I was feeling like wasting my time: I was already quite old and stuck in a jurassic environment
Then, I landed in a new company. Completely different environment: they use modern frameworks, TDD, static analysis, code reviews and stuff, and they do one to one meetings every two weeks. From the beginning, I felt like I was the dinosaur there: they were way ahead of me and I struggled to keep the pace. I immediately said that to my manager, but he was like "don't worry, it's just the start. I'm sure you will do great". Except I did not. I started collecting criticism about my work and I keep receiving it. When I tell my manager that constant criticism is not good for my self esteem, he replies "I can understand, but you have to manage it and I cannot avoid to correct you when you make mistakes". But it became really difficult for me to receive constant criticism, I very rarely have a compliment or a good word about what I do.
Is it just me? Should I finally grow up now that I am almost 40 and accept that working always sucks and you cannot be satisfied of what you do? Or am I simply a bad developer and should look for another job?
I am starting to get tired of this situation.

Today a senior developer and a colleague started looking into my code reviews and started commenting best practices that were never used in the team.
Got my chance back at the senior developer's code when he raised a code review, which had none of the best practices.
Gave back a good set of review comments to him :D
Karma is a boomerang :)

Shoutouts to the former programmer that put 5 controllers and 1 service in a single .js file

Anaconda. Quite fitting a name to something that fucks up python environments so thoroughly. Ironic too, given that it was meant to simplify. Anaconda doesn't give a shit about the python that came with the distro. And all packages installed with pip are only visible to anacondas python. Not a single note of caution during installation​. Or a best practices guide for the newbie. Just chaos. Utter chaos. The price of being a noob had been paid.

To the web devs here: What resources would you recommend for catching up a little to the web development state of the art? The last time I have designed anything HTML5/CSS3 were just being introduced. So my knowledge is pretty outdated, but I'm note starting from zero. I'm looking for some best practices and something framework-agnostic would be nice. Unless you say “Dude it's 2017, nobody even boils water without using *.js”, of course.

I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.

For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".

but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)

One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.

Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.

It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.

See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........

W

I'm torn on dev bootcamps.

On one hand, I learn the most in hands-on direct tinkering and bootcamps tend to exude this with well-trained instructors following best practices.

On the other hand, the short timeline means corners are cut and an overwhelming amount of material is dropped all at once leading to a leaky retention vessel at the end.

I prefer ramping up learning over a period of time to gain experience than a fire hose approach.

Tasked with changing a couple of captions on a form. Literly as simple as 'Enter product' to 'Enter item' kind of change.

Reported in our morning stand up the changes where complete, tested and deployed (maybe 15 minutes worth of work including code check out/in, copying the file, etc)

DevA: "Ha ha...that's why you put those strings in resource files."
DevB: "No kidding. Not sure when we'll ever start doing best practices around here."

It was all I could do from saying "What the -bleep-!? That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.

I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.

Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.

PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.

Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.

I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues.

"I would say my biggest pet peeve related to the industry would be people focusing on technology instead of design, standards instead of users, and validation rather than innovation. Web standards and best practices are noble goals, but all too often in our community people forget they are a means to an end, not the end itself." - Jeff Croft

Project is dammed, is broken, we complain about it for almost 3 months, daily, code is old and client is full of bad practices and is always searching for a way to blame us for his failure.
Administration decides that best solution is motivate meditation techniques on dev team

<<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>>

I never worked on PHP. Sharing to get more knowledge!

Every once in a while I start to question my development principles and start to read articles, especially software philosophical, and try to improve my practices, aswell as find several trade-offs between my own best practices.

Good friend, Jay. Helped level up my understanding over the years, JS patterns, using APIs, best practices, etc.

Also helped kill off anxiety about the community by proving we work together and share knowledge.

Many thanks and I hope everyone has a Jay in their life.

Hey, you, my new colleague, you are annoying. I have reviewed your PR and left about 50 comments on your mess. I even explained to you why half of your code is shit in a very polite way. I have explained why you have to rewrite that and even how to do that in the best way possible. Result? Half of the code is gone, it works as before but without the overhead.

Now you're annoying cuz I have to go again on conventions and best practices. I totally understand that you've been doing it differently and throwing buzz words at me won't help. Just stop and do it as it's needed in this project, don't reinvent the wheel only because you can.

You know what? Fuck it! I'll approve all your PRs, anyway I am leaving soon. There is no benefit for me to teach you stuff. You're one of those guys that I voted against in interviewing process. But guess what? My manager decided to hire you anyway! Ha! I rarely vote NO and you were a one of those...

Your confidence doesn't impress me. That works on people that have no clue on what you are doing. Your just average at best, not a superstar.

Fuck it, you're on your own now!

Load tests:

I'm used to do load tests in Visual Studio where it gives which line is exactly your bottleneck. But now I'm using VS Code (visual studio requires enterprise license for load tests :\ no longer have one)

Anyways long story short, what are the best practices for load tests? For me what I'm testing is how much can a given hardware specs handle and when test fails I go back and check if code can be optimized, is this the correct way to do this?

The senior engineer on my project is working with Kafka. Completely unaware of the possibility of rescheduling failed messages with a fixed delay he was trying to put a Thread.sleep somewhere in the consumer to emulate the feature.

Sometime i would like to burst out crying because I feel like I'm the only one who care about writing good code and using best practices.

The more in the industry the more I realise titles don't matters. Everything is shit, everything...

If there's one thing I hate about devs is definitely when they get too emotional about the reviews they receive.

Doing a thorough review always takes significant amount of time and energy. It's about ensuring high quality of code, about functionality and best practices, ... It's also about learning: I learn from the changes being reviewed while at the same time I also try to teach the author as much as possible, giving down to earth opinions.

It's never (or at least should never be) about attacking the author. There really is no reason why someone would spend all this time getting overly personal.

I used to start my responses with (lousy) apologies for being "harsh", but stopped doing this now that my team understands all of this. It also helped asking them to do the same with my changes. The look in their eyes when they find something is simply invaluable :).

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

Working full time as a "Protocol Engineer" for a big company, taking care of pretty much everything related to AS/NAS on the network layer (2G, 3G, 4G).

I hate it, but it pays really well.

On my free time, revising ML/DL stuff from Udacity's nano (finished it last year) while studying for the VR nano and keeping my coding skills fresh (basic to advanced structures, coding strategies, best practices and stuff).

Love it, but usually I pay a heavy price to keep my mind in place.

Sometimes I just wish to give everythin up and travel the world with my 2 bucks and just try to get some rest. :v

To all of you who go through this kind of stuff, how are you holding up?

A reality that most people are not ready to accept, is that if you work too hard or work too smart as a freelancer, you're going to hurt yourself financially.

I have given my clients amazing code which runs fast, is optimised, and is readable to the point where you can hire a fresher to maintain it.

Doing that has resulted in stable systems but those clients walked away from me and have never come back, means no more money.

But some of the companies I have worked for, I have seen some retarded-ass devs barely able to make a system run and write code, have retained clients for years. They pretty much have a "submit ticket resolve ticket" kinda mechanism.

It's situations like these where it makes me question, what's the point of learning best practices if I'm gonna get hurt financially for it.

My first gig was with an MSP doing tech support and eventually some proper infrastructure design and mangement.

Regularly myself and colleagues would find reasons why we should be doing things 'this way' and how we're doing wrong by our customers by not following best practices. (Things like firmware upgrades on routers, switches, servers)

We regularly got shutdown, just told 'no, it's not to be touched if it isn't breaking'. This obviously got us pretty worked up and kinda devided us.

The thing is, It wasn't until my next gig that I sorta realised they were kinda right to shut us down. There was clearly a risk to reward equation we weren't thinking about as employees with no financial stake in the company.

In an enterprise setting, sure doing those kinds of upgrades is necessary, and normally you have a team full of experts and tools to help you do those tasks whilst also mitigating as much risk as possible.

So at the time it felt like a bad experience, but looking back now I realise that from a business perspective it wasn't practical for us to constantly risk breaking things just because 'i read somewhere that we should do this'.

I think to be successful as a developer, IT tech, systems engineer, it's really important to get to know the other departments of the business and how the work you do affects them.

ChatGPT is so much better than Google:
instead of wasting my time by linking to unhelpful / outdated / unrelated StackOverflow resources, it tells me to do the work by myself right away:

> To ensure consistent pseudo-element width across different browsers, including Safari, you can follow these steps: [...]
> (some basic HTML/CSS 101 seemingly quoted from a 2015 textbook)
>
> It's important to note that browser behavior might vary due to different rendering engines or versions. While following best practices helps achieve consistent results, you might still encounter small discrepancies. Cross-browser testing is always recommended to ensure your design looks consistent across different browsers, including Safari.
>
> For any specific issues you encounter in Safari, consider checking for known bugs or quirks that might affect pseudo-elements and their sizing. Online resources, developer forums, and documentation can provide valuable insights into Safari-specific behavior and workarounds.

It really grinds my gears when new hires just start adding themselves to every fucking slack channel and then start crapping up the channel history with irrelevant chatter.

Business Analysts and Project Managers do not need to be in #developers sending mock-ups to a UI/UX designer for one team, or posting an xkcd strip you found on the internet because you "got it" and you think you are proving that you are one of us by posting it there. This channel isn't a fucking club, its where ALL developers at this company across all teams share tools and practices for us to maintain consistency and best practices and to improve our craft, or to give a heads-up about vulnerabilities.

There is a specific channel for your role, and your project. You don't need to be everywhere and in every conversation. And for fuck's sake, PLEASE stop @someone adding people to these channels just because you think you saw something in there posted by someone else that they should see. You can just fucking share that message directly with that person, or in another channel.

When Email and Time-sheet is everything in the workplace....
They literally don't care about your work or about successfully deploying project, if you don't have it in timesheet then you did nothing.

They want me to work on totally new things and expect to get the results within week and when I mention this is new and I can't even give estimates, they want that to be in an Email. Like WTF!! you even know this is fucking new thing that only I'm working on, there's no one to help me.

And I'm here learning,studying so I can solve these out of scope requirements with best practices.

And in the meantime they also want me to work one few other things .__.

My dad used to write DbaseII programs for the Marines in the 80s (logistics officer, was moving the batallion’s local copy of maintenance records to digital in parallel with the mandatory file card system), then went on to manage enterprise-level software development programs as a government contractor when he got out, so he has a pretty good sense of what goes on in my small, 1-man web shop, and has even advised on best practices at times. Mom knows the basics from years of observation.

Recently my dad also became a business partner in a venture we’re working on launching, so for that particular project he has a *very*clear idea of what goes on and where things are at.

What are peoples thoughts on taking a sort of backwards step in their career in order to get more experience?

I took my current job as I thought it would be a stepping stone to go on and do more development work (it was my first dev role), but I’ve been here 4.5 years and I rarely do anything other than maybe fix a bug every now and then.

They mainly have me doing non-dev support type stuff, and they don’t use any best practices or anything like that, and I feel that I am falling behind where I should be experience wise.

I am doing a degree (distance learning with the Open University) so I am working on personal development but that’s not much help when I go to interviews.

Should I think about trying to go for junior jobs, rather than just developer jobs, and the pay cuts that may go with that, or should I just grind out leet code etc and keep booking interviews?