rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

Me: Hans, Get ze Flammenwerfer!!!

Hans: Why?

Me: The fucker rejected my PR because "calling twice the same getter is a code duplication". I swear, he always tries to find something!

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A class with nearly 70% code duplication by 2900 Lines of Code.

New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.

I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.

And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.

And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.

I think I've been doing too much Android programming in the last three days.

Had a lucid dream last night where I couldn't wake up until I figured out how to set up an inter-thread latch that would allow me to process through a shit ton of data points in parallel without duplication or skipping errors in the most efficient manner (effectively no blocking). We're talking several hundred lines of code. Slept 14 hours last night, I heard my alarm but didn't wake up. When I finally got up, I did what I did in my dream and it worked better than the existing code.

Turns out my brain is great at Java evaluation now, I guess.

Freaking love it when devs from other teams work on you code base and implement components you already have ... Don't talk to each other, just submit your awsome code and leave a mess behind. But OK ... Just a simple click on Pull Request -> Denied!

Duplication of code is 'evil'...

The lack of one (no thinking about long term design and issues) leading to poorly designed systems that crumble when it needs to be scaled and has massive bus factor and code duplication.

Eureka! I have done it! I have written a program that will replace 80% of programmers with an AI!

The approach is to use grammar identification with language heuristics to recognize solution patterns using multilayered neural networks. The code source uses trusted pattern samples that are scored by human programmers. The code is programmed using text duplication and placement from the trusted sources.

TLDR: Uses pattern matching to copy and paste from Stack Overflow.

Sometimes people want to be too smart. If you want to consume a handful different restful API, it might make sense to abstract away some common functionality in your client implementation — yet to assume they follow the same convention in how their URI is built is borderline insane.

All I wanted to do was to change one API to a newer version, and now the implementation breaks for at least two other because it was done in an Abstract class and now I have to untangle that mess.

In some cases code duplication wouldn't be that bad. Even if an otherwise unrelated API seemingly share the same contract, still assume it has its own contract. You never know how those API evolve and I proclaim they will evolve towards breaking your assumptions.

Just figured out "code map" and "code clones" on VS 2015 (don't ask me why I didn't know these features)

Thought I should try it on my newly created application for a client (+/- 1500 lines of code C#)

Came across 1 duplication, 0 unreferenced classes or members and no circular references

I'm just awesome

As I started learning React, I found the allure of declarative style of programming appealing. I try to avoid maintaining multiple state variables for data that can be derived from the base state itself that's stored in the redux store. It works wonders when I have to change something; as I just need to make changes to one function in the utils folder and that change is implemented across the whole app, rather than change the instances everywhere as was the case when I initially started working on this project after the previous dev left.

But I see myself redefining a lot of computed values everywhere, and if I just try to define them in the root component, I'll end up with a huge list of props being passed to a couple of components. Shifting it to the utils folder helps a bit, but then I find myself defining even the simplest of array filtering methods to the utils folder.

Is this need to define computed values everywhere a trade-off that you need to accept when you write declarative code, or is there a workaround/solution I am missing? As of now, the code-base is much better than how it used to be when they had a literal Java dev work on React with their knowledge of Java patterns being used in a framework that is the polar opposite of OOP, but I still feel like there's room for improvement in this duplication of computed values.

The big enterprise in which I work wants to mandate which we have to write a microservice for each individual HTTP endpoint, since we cannot even have an artifactory for code sharing the code duplication is going off the charts and having these microservices sharing a single DB we are creating a big and messy distributed monolith.

wasting time trying to write good code and minimize duplication , but it probably won't work and there are no working examples

duplicate code and do the stupid thing, which will work, with extra dumbass boilerplate code to convert between swagger2 & 3 schema

fuck you swagger code gen

Recently joined new Android app (product) based project & got source code of existing prod app version.

Product source code must be easy to understand so that it could be supported for long term. In contrast to that, existing source structure is much difficult to understand.

Package structure is flat only 3 packages ui, service, utils. No module based grouped classes.

No memory release is done. So on each screen launch new memory leaks keep going on & on.

Too much duplication of code. Some lazy developer in the past had not even made wrappers to avoid direct usage of core classes like Shared Preference etc. So at each place same 4-5 lines were written.

Too much if-else ladders (4-5 blocks) & unnecessary repetitions of outer if condition in inner if condition. It looks like the owner of this nested if block implementation has trust issues, like that person thought computer 'forgets' about outer if when inside inner if.

Too much misuse of broadcast receiver to track activities' state in the era of activity, apપ life cycle related Android library.

Sometimes I think why people waste soooo... much efforts in the wrong direction & why can't just use library?!!

These things are found without even deep diving into the code, I don't know how much horrific things may come out of the closet.

This same app is being used by many companies in many different fields like banking, finance, insurance, govt. agencies etc.

Sometimes I surprise how this source passed review & reached the production.