I hired a woman for senior quality assurance two weeks ago. Impressive resume, great interview, but I was met with some pseudo-sexist puzzled looks in the dev team.

Meeting today. Boss: "Why is the database cluster not working properly?"

Team devs: "We've tried diagnosing the problem, but we can't really find it. It keeps being under high load."

New QA: "It might have something to do with the way you developers write queries".

She pulls up a bunch of code examples with dozens of joins and orderings on unindexed columns, explains that you shouldn't call queries from within looping constructs, that it's smart to limit the data with constraints and aggregations, hints at where to actually place indexes, how not to drag the whole DB to the frontend and process it in VueJS, etc...

New QA: "I've already put the tasks for refactoring the queries in Asana"

I'm grinning, because finally... finally I'm not alone in my crusade anymore.

Boss: "Yeah but that's just that code quality nonsense Bittersweet always keeps nagging about. Why is the database not working? Can't we just add more thingies to the cluster? That would be easier than rewriting the code, right?"

Dev team: "Yes... yes. We could try a few more of these aws rds db.m4.10xlarge thingies. That will solve it."

QA looks pissed off, stands up: "No. These queries... they touch the database in so many places, and so violently, that it has to go to therapy. That's why it's down. It just can't take the abuse anymore. You could add more little brothers and sisters to the equation, but damn that would be cruel right? Not to mention that therapy isn't exactly cheap!"

Dev team looks annoyed at me. My boss looks even more annoyed at me. "You hired this one?"

I keep grinning, and I nod.

"I might have offered her a permanent contract"

Quality code I made, as always

Quality code you say...

Sometimes happens with my own code !

Yes Linus Torvalds is an asshole and the world is better because of it.

In short Linus's acid takes on code quality over developer fee fee's might be one of the things that has made the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux project such a long lasting open source success and in my opinion the risk of him falling for all this "let's be nice and non offensive" bs trend may impact negatively on code quality.

Being an asshole has it's downsides and it's not always the best response, I'll give you that, but personally I think most of us who are viewed as assholes are seen like that because we put quality over convenience, facts before feelings and dedication over mediocrity; it is not because we hate you, it's because we measure ourselves with the same stick.

It depends on one's character, but when you've been toughened up because of bullying(I don't doubt many devs have been since being a nerd has never been hip) or life in general, you learn to stop whining & pick yourself up and you expect everyone to be competitive and competent as you are and it gets frustrating to manage people who don't fulfill your expectations.

Pros: You get shit done and you do it well.
Cons: People won't like you and you don't tolerate failure (much less mediocrity).

Yes Linus is an asshole, my coach was an asshole, some of my best teacher's have been assholes, I had friends who were assholes, heck I'm an asshole!

But I thank them because they made me better than I was, just as people have thanked me for being the right amount of asshole.

A warm thank you and fuck you Linus, keep being the asshole we need.

Still true

This is how one of our junior devs solved a merge conflict

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

I grinded out 8k lines of code in four weeks, but don't consiter myself a programmer.

I can sit down at a computer and in under five minutes have all of the passwords saved to a USB, and the OS is rendered unusable, but I don't consiter myself a hacker.

I can make great high quality artwork, but don't call myself an artist.

I got 2k ++ in 16 days, but have yet to order my stickers because I don't feel like i've earned them.

But most impressively of all, I can fool everyone around me into thinking I'm happy. Even though I'm unsure I can even feel it.

..Bit of a darker rant, but some things need to be said.

Heard the plumber yelling because of the work someone before him did on my heating system...

As a programmer:

Your code is your karma 😅

How do I code....

The actual metrics to evaluate the quality of code 😂

Please for the love of god name your variables in a sensible way! How the FUCK am I supposed to read your shitcode if you decide to write 6 (!!!) nested loops with variables each named by exactly one character. With no comments whatsoever!

I would rather crack password hashes than this nonsense.

Found this aesthetic gem in an ionic project which I have to enhance now 👌🏻

The only useful indicator of code-quality is the wtf-per-minute scale.

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

---- Startup RantLife ----

A senior developer joined the team, let's name him Bob, and this guy is really good no doubts about that.
He made suggestions, some improvements, but Bob is always waving his hands and says out loud that some part of the code base is really really bad.
I kept quiet until one day I had to pair with Bob to check a feature. Guess what happened, as usual, Bob clenched his fist and start pointing that this code is super ugly.
So let's check the history of changes and boom, Bob was the main writer.
That moment, I was completely silent, trying not to smile as Bob came up with an excuse, he never admits that he is wrong, now he needs a scapegoat and he starts blaming the process, the planning...
I believe that being humble and saying sorry is a quality that it requires time to develop.
So don't be like Bob, please :)

The first code review

I'm not sure if my in-laws know me really well, or if they are secretly plugged into Github and are making a comment on my code.

Reviewing coworker's code:

Me: I see you're doing a convoluted sort for every element twice to get your two lists in sync... 😐
CoWorker: Yeah. *straight face, no regrets* That's the only way to do this.
Me:... Uh... No? You can just manage one list with a simple struct and then use the the standard sort.
Coworker: Yeah sure I know. But it'll take time. We don't have time.
Me: *aghast* This is embarrassingly bad code!
Coworker: Don't worry, later on I'll use a hashmap for it. But this needs to be pushed now.
Me: *to myself, no you don't need a hashmap*
Okay, you do you but I can't back you on this. It isn't going to take a lot of time to correct it.

Next day.
Coworker: Hey can you review my code again?
Me: You've made the changes already? *in a bored tone, knowing that they wouldn't have changed shit*
Coworker: No this is a different file. Our manager agrees that we can worry about performance later.
Me: Sure. *😀🔨🔨*

Few weeks pass by:
QA: The operation takes absurdly long time to complete even with the smallest data. Ten minutes for X is unacceptable.
Me: Who would've known? ☺️

Volunteered to fix a brittle component in our app. Turned out to be 26 classes of mostly copy pasted code that is riddled with todos and void of feedback for the user. Here's a pretty representative sample of this code's quality:

When I show someone my code

just another day at office working on legacy code.

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

Boss: Have you finished that feature?
Me: Almost there, i'm refactoring some classes...
Boss: What? Refactor? But thisnis a new feature, it does not need refactor! We don't have time for this!
Me: 😵🔫

This is what happen when you care about code quality.

International quality of code measurement? WTFs/minute

A guy breaks into your house and start slapping your face with a huge C programming book for 5 minutes until you bleed top quality code from your nose.

Well this is what I was going to comment to the "learn C in 5 minutes app" rant, but can't find it anymore.

Worst experience with cs profs? Oh boy....

Databases lab: "You'll need to work of this snippet, if your IDE tells you it's deprecated you don't need to care about it"
If you want to imagine the quality of the code base we were expected to work upon just think about that attached xkcd comic, basically an undecipherable black box.

The instructions where at the same time micro managing everything (he gave us frickin variable names to use, and no good ones, no the database connection had to be called datbc, yeah very descriptive) and yet so obfuscated that I'm not completely sure he didn't resurrect Kant himself to ghostwrite for him.

He also didn't like us to use any Java feature that was to 'modern', for example for each loops since "they offer no benefit over normal for loops".

Further, everything we wrote had to be documented with a relationship diagram and a uml. So far no problem if he hadn't invented his own flavor of both (which can be read about in his book).
Oh, and he almost failed me because I used a lambda expression in his 'code on paper' exam and this "arrows are a C command" I "must have been confused"... which is glorious coming from the guy who can't get operators and commands straight.

WTF is up with open-source projects using emojis in their commit messages... FUCKING emojis..

I get it, programming is fun and a hobby to many, but can we also keep at least a minimum level of professionalism here.

WTF is a wheelchair or bento emoji at the beginning of a commit message supposed to mean? Why the hell even bother to use it in the first place? There is no fucking reason for this retarded shit.

Is this what happens when activist developers get out of their way to make programming "inclusive"?

It is your personal project and so if you want to use emojis it is OK, I respect that (not really) but I can't trust your code, your commitment, or the quality of your work if I see those dumb Unicode characters there.

Git commit messages are not a game. Be playful with comments in code or your readme.md file but git messages should be a clear reflection of the changes not what a teenager's phone vomited on the keyboard.

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

I am that colleague that writes bad quality code

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

The rants I read here make me want to be a better developer. I started writing tests, linting code and ensuring 'quality code' because of the devrant community. Being a self taught developer, you never really have anyone to thank. But today I would like to appriciate you all for the rants, comments and advice that make us developers become better at our craft.

A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.

A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.

So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉

My boyfriend, actually. But I value the human aspect more than the tech genius in fairness. He may be no Linus Torvalds but I don't care and wouldn't change him.

Why him?

He's very kind to less experienced developers and always happy to help them. He teaches them not only how to solve things but how to get un-stuck the next time and what to learn.
His code reviews are inside out, not just a quick scan, he gives a chance to learn and takes one for himself too.
He takes pride in delivering great quality, well thought over code, on time.
He owns his mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when he makes them.
He reads a ton of tech books and always learns something new yet stays humble while discussing things he knows a lot about.
He has a ton of hobbies other than coding which he's good at.

Ah there, yeah whatever I'm a big softie today 😋 he's not on DevRant btw. Also sometimes I want to punch him too, but mainly he's a good guy :)

Gotta love XKCD Fridays

This is how you know you write good code

"Quality CSS" is much a fucking misnomer. As someone whose been writing this shit at scale for 15+ years I can tell you all CSS code is garbage. The only thing you should do is make sure you don't have name collisions. Classes/components are self contained. And use variables when possible. DRY makes sense usually, but if you're dogmatic about it you shoot yourself in the foot.

No matter how much product owners claim "bugs have priority over anything else", "we value high quality structured code", and "we do test driven development"...

...Once a big client wants a feature to be developed before they sign up, dirty code will be written from napkin specs, and that code will always be refractored "soon".

1. Refactor shitty code because it is hard to maintain
2. Rant about how can someone write a code like that
3. Check commit log to see who is the person to blame
4. Found out that's me

I'm real tired of my coworkers always trying to one up me and being elitist about their code. Like I get it, you think PHP is shit, C is so much better than Java. Wow, you must be so knowledgeable! /s

Just because you're bashing on bad languages and talking shit doesn't mean you write good code, and in fact your code isn't top quality, I've read it. All you're going to accomplish with an elitist mindset is close yourself off to improving, and that's probably the worst thing you can do as a developer.

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

That moment you realise why you enjoy the dev life again.

It's been a long time since I've had a solid day of coding, just coding..., no meetings, no wild requests, no crazy issues, no data fixing because someone can't type a number correctly, just me, myself and that keyboard going on a field trip of quality coding time again.

Ah, it's a good day to end the week on!

!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++;

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

Cringed when I saw camelCase, snake_case, PascalCase and CONSTS (for non consts) in 10 consecutive lines of code! 😖😖😖

I suppose if you don't know which coding style to pick... Just try them all!!!!! 😱

That moment when the you actually think that this huge refactoring isn't worth it, but you do it anyway so you can live with yourself...
Code quality is love. Code quality is life.

An open letter to those who think lines of code == a decent metric for productivity:
NO!!!

Just because I wrote 10 lines of code all day (yes just 10 very well thought out, many times rewritten) lines doesn't mean my day was unproductive. Quite the opposite, while other devs pad their shit with:

//Adds 1 to I
I++;

Yup. Quality code. LOC doesn't lie.

if ($id != $product->getId()) {
return false;
}
return false;

What's the point?

How often does this happen????

Then they can't blame us for code quality.

Use Meaningful variable names, they said.

I'm working in a blockchain company for $180 as a junior programmer and there is a mid-senior guy who get ~8 times more than me. So we got a project to make a backend API with its tests. When I was partly completed my part of the project I asked that "mid-senior" to share his code with me. Nothing was done, and he asked me to push my changes to git so he could start to do something (view at my code and start copying). BUT. He couldn't even pull from git. He couldn't use that fucking Visual studio's team explorer and even the solution explorer. Ok, he was working with VS for the first time, but I did too. I cloned the repo gave him the environment to start "working" and get back to my work. After that nothing changed, he was writing each one-lined if block for half hour and the code was very dirty. Finally I've got his laptop and started to writing his part by teaching him all the programming. You may say I'm mad. I really do, I think that I did all project. This is sad... How can people get this much by being this far from the programming? We need really high quality programmers.

Yeah git... I want to do this, too...

My teachers use the number of commit you do as measure for the quality of your work.

I've the least number of commits this week since I spent most of the week doing encriptions algorthims instead of UIs and unit test as the rest of my team.

But, by their logic, I'm the worst of the group. It's simply stupid.

How I spend my days at work working with legacy code:

* Writing tests before I do anything
* Noticing that i cannot write tests because of antipatterns. Lots of them.
* Refactoring to make at least a tiny bit testable.
* Then writing tests.
* More rewriting and refactoring
* Finally adding that one feature my boss asked me for
* Writing tests for that new feature (my do that before implementing)
* Explaining to my boss why it took me so long and agreeing on stopping writing tests.
* 2 days later: explaining why i still broke something.

But in the end my code works just fine.
my colleagues handle things differently. They just ignore problems as long as at least one feature works a bit.

Everyone complains that a certain developer's code is not up to standard and when they have to take over his project the lack of code quality is really slowing them down.

I look at code, agree it is poor quality and put together a learning plan for said developer.

Also look at who approved every pull request which allowed bad code into our codebase. Same developers as those complaining it's no good. You had your chance to stop it!

The first fucking law of software quality...

e=mc²

errors=(more code)²

Yo, is this devrant or spamspace???

Like, do you even fucking work, mates? Are you a dev? How doesn't a fucking legacy code piss you off on a daily basis? What are all the ways you want to respond to your customer's/PM's abuse? Does your lead dev even know jackshit?

Where did all your quality rants go? Why do you all sound like second graders writing essays for school? Have some passion for your job, and hatred for the incompetence for others!

Now, go produce some quality rants! Funny ones too! Bonus points if it's angry-funny.

why dont any startup company concern themselves with quality.. oh i hate shipping shitty code.. 😞

Manager: what is the estimations for this task A nd B?

Me: Task A: 3 months for 1 guys, and task B: 2 Months

Manager: ok, u can have a fresher, and finish task A, and u urself can pick task B, u can train him and bring him up to pace...

Me: (trying to recalibrate my estimations)...

Manager: oh and u have 3 weeks to deliver production ready scalable quality code with junits, documentation and testing done...

Me: then why the fuck did u bother for the estimates?

Manager: oh that is just for the process complaince...I don't want any trouble in audit...

Me : *writes code and feel good about the result and quality *
Code reviewer : Dafuq is this shit

I was having dinner with two girls, one a project manager and the other some finance reviewer or something like that. We were discussing our line of work and I was talking about how bad quality code affects everybody and the finance reviewer girl goes like (and I quote) "In our company we use polymorphism, inheritance and encapsulation so it's not a big problem. So our database has a parent class and we only use the parent class". I was at a loss for words. I mean, if only more programmers just did that, right?

the only valid measurement of code quality

As a consultant, you get tasked with a variety of stuff. Last few weeks been struggling to maintain an old C++ application that was written by a complete tool of an a$$hole with zero knowledge on how to write maintainable and production quality code. It would hardly run without a crash. First it was a challenge I had to accept, but as I stabilized the code and just fell over even more traps, I had to admit defeat and review my approach.

Rewrite is something I would choose last, but this one ticked all the marks worthy of a rewrite. So, the customer is a very friendly researcher and gladly spent 15 hours with me explaining all the math and concepts - just a delight for a programmer to have such a customer. Two days in, with a DDD approach - a functional, more precise, faster and stable application.

Sometimes there is no rant to share, it's rare to have that perfect communication with a customer that is so dedicated that he spends so much time teaching you his speciality and actually understand your approach. DDD was really a lifesaver here, by using it's key concepts and ubiquitous language. The program is essentially 8000 lines of math, but wrapping it up with value objects and strong domain models made me understand his domain and him mine. It also allowed me to parallelize the computations, giving me a huge performance boost. Textbook approach, there will not be many like this!

I'm task to amend the code smell in the project. I literally can cry a river.
I see such thing as i = i++; - It's flag out as a bug.

I have also seen check in classes. With un-used variables. I literally cried.

In the past, i ask why do i got to care about code quality. I actually start to get angry like the team leads in my project.

Hired a designer below me.. guy never wrote a full back nor frontend... Used npm shit for all his solutions and worked his way above me just by kissing ass and polluting the codebase in such a way 70% would be open source shitty plugins for shit he could not do by himself code wise...

At some point he assigned some of his tasks to me and I couldn't work with his patchy framework that was non existent within the codebase I worked on ...

At some point between npm installed tantrums I got pulled up to HR because my code quality dropped... And it was this fucktart that accused me of this saying I could not do modern development...

In the end I either had to butkiss after his butts or just quit, so I did the latter... I told him and HR I owned alot more code quality than this asshat but just not his way of working and therefor it was more an issue of code equality I was never aware of ...

A month after that the company got overtaken by some silicon valley bullshit company buying up competition, and he is still working within that shithole dealing with 90's tech...

Was the best thing that happened to me, after that I grew alot in skillset and such by investments from other jobs and projects... If I would still work there today I would consider myself a caveman

"Whatever, it runs fine..."
"So does a burning bus"

Management: Create [totally idiotic and complicated feature, near to impossible to create]
Me: that's close to impossible and could probably destroy some other parts of the application.
Management: well, then your application is poorly programmed.

DAFUQ? HOW DARE TO JUDGE THE QUALITY OF MY CODE WITHOUT EVEN ABLE TO READ 2 LINES OF CSS? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS THIS?

I'm really not easily offended but this sentence hit really hard.

Today I started work on a new project that contains a lot of legacy. I asked the developers about unit testing javascript and was told that not only is there none in place, but it's not worth adding any in.

At first, I grimaced and thought fair enough. This is their codebase, it's their choice. I've now been thinking about this for a few hours and have instead decided that screw those guys, I'm adding in a testing framework, a module pattern that's compatible with the existing code, and unit testing the crap out of it. If they don't want it they can refactoring it out, but I can't bring myself to intentionally deliver code I know is crap.

I WILL FORCE CODE QUALITY ON THEM.

I'd say one of the best advice a dev gave me, was that, I should not write duplicate code, but rewrite these parts to a single function.

And another one: If you use specific values in the code, instead of putting it in multiple places, assign it to a variable at one place and use the variable later on.

These advices sound quite trivial, but I think every beginner should learn these as eary as possible.
Boiiii have I seen shitty code from people who don't give a hobo's ass about maintainable code.

Be a good coder.
Write for quality, not quantity.
Care about your successor.

Thank you.
If not, I will fucking find you, fill your guts with napalm and light you up alive on a rusty pole while laughing hysterically.

I dont see why recruiters find it relevant to ask how many lines of code a piece of software has. Like seriously why!?!?!?!

It by no means measures the quality of the code or the usability or complexity of the software.

I saw this on the first page of a book that discusses techniques for writing clean code... The more I think about it, the more accurate it tests.

I think Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin should be a must to read.
In school no teacher puts emphasis on code quality.
They should learn how to name variables and functions the right way at an early stage in order to better perfect their craft :)

Gotta love moments when you find legacy code like this :)

P.S. Yeah, that was the whole script, written by just one guy.

I recently joined a new company where work is quite different than my previous company.
Every day at work is challenging for me. There is good exposure to learn technology in depth. But time constraint to deliver module like under 3 days does not let me learn my work, also I am not satisfy with the quality of my code that I provide, it more looks like a patch. In my previous company I was favorite developer of my team but here I feel like a fresher who doesn't know from where to start.

Even I feel like my presence does not make any impact in office as I am just like an extra player of the team. I am slow at my work because I learn then I code due to which my manager does not consider me for any new work. I feel like left out in my team.

Once I overheard one of my colleague he called me helpless and were making fun of me. With every passing day I am losing my confidence.

I have no github reputation. It's like I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Every day is like big fight day in office.
I know our only way to survive in this industry is to keep on learning but in smart way. I am not sure what's that smart way?

Any advice would be helpful.

Code quality check punishes writing massive documentation strings due to "too many lines of code"

FML

When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.

For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.

The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.

My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.

Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.

However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.

*what*

I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".

I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.

He didn't pass the exam.

For me, the worst co-worker is one who works by the principle of quantity over quality or a person who thinks quick and ugly fixes are a valid way to solve problems. Also: If there are unittest, don't fucking dare to change or remove them, just so your code runs without errors.

But in general, I just can't work with people who don't really think about what they are coding, people who just code straight ahead without making the simplest plan about how to solve something. Most of these people realize too late, that their approach was rather shitty, unreadable and unmaintainable.

I often see memes about "I forgot what I coded last [insert timespan here]". Though it is kind of normal, if it takes you too long to find out what you wrote, you should consider overthinking your coding approaches.

Just my 50 cents.

Damn I miss coding... 4 weeks of learning & exams is too long...

The weekend is here!!!
Time to go out and have fun!!!

Nah just joking. Time to write some quality code after cleaning our company's backend (pun definitely intended) all week!

The only valid measurement of code quality

So... Yeah... Code quality

So I'm looking through my emails this morning and I see this nugget which really catches my eye. "What does man has to do to get his build done" writes Damyan from Bulgaria. Poor Damyan, we've all been there. Your code compiles locally but some poorly written unit test blows it back in your face. Unit test failure report leaves you scratching your head.

Of course engineering team responds to Damyan and suggests that perhaps his code is really to blame. Knowing the quality of our tests this scenario is rather unlikely. Damyan agrees with me and points out how the test is behaving non-deterministically. The engineering guys say fix the test then.

What does man has to do to get his build done? Damyan's words run through my head as I sip my morning coffee. I can feel his frustration as if it were my own. I don't think I have ever empathized more with another human being (even though we've never actually met). What does man has to do to get his build done? Will we ever know?

Either way his words will adorn the whiteboard as the quote of the day in honor of all developers who are putting their sanity on the line trying to tame unruly build servers.

2019 goals:

- finish my masters
- improve my code quality
- build at least 3 personal projects
- learn 2 new technologies
- find better clients or a good job

"Potimized imports and remopved temp code"

Can't help but wonder what's the code quality like from an author of such a carefully written commit message 🤔

Our CTO doesn't believe that tests improve code quality. We have no tests on any level, no testers/QA, no code reviews. Nada. I wonder why production keeps breaking 🤔 Guess I'll start looking for another job 🤷‍♂️

I dont know what to feel anymore.

Got hired directly without an interview into 'Data-analytics' department in fortune 500 company. This is my first job. Got hired because this company want start a website that cost millions.

Even though I am junior, I can see that this company has no idea about software development at all. No git server, no code review, no quality assurance and no proper workflow. No senior developer to guide us (junior dev) too.

There is one 'senior' consultant that work on automation project here but he just focus on his work and don't help us directly too.

The contract is about 1 year. Still got 11 months to go :/

Staying up late night and sacrifice on sleep to complete the task at hand. A good night's sleep will result in good quality code.

Everyone is on their vacation and I am in good mood so time to refactor some 3 year old frontend, angular, javascript code. After 5 minutes of looking, some great quality of code snippet on the image below.

met a client yesterday to discuss about the coming task. After discussion, we agreed that I will develop the API for the system in one month. I did the planning and posted the upcoming tasks in Trello. Today, he told me some of the tasks have been done by his staff and asked me if I can continue the remaining tasks and get it done in one week. Hey, bro, what you want!? it is not what we agreed! do you think i can understand the code that your staff wrote, with poor documentation and structure, in few hours and immediately start working on it, yet deliver everything with high quality? come on...

Found my old code.

You gotta admit, that's some clean code there, considering I learned C# only for a year at that time.

But those comments....
VeRy WeLl WrItTeN, vErY dEtAiLeD, vErY gOoD

let's try something...
Roast thread, please tag and insult your fellow devRanter in this comment section. Get creative in finding swearwords. Too many ++ bombs, poor code quality or you're just secretly in love with some other Ranter and hate it.

!rant

Got back into android development recently and while everything was pretty flawless ( I managed to get the basic concepts implemented in a day) something wasn't right.

For some reason I was not happy with the code i wrote, although I took examples from google and tried to adapt their code style. It looked aweful. I hated my code.
But the code itself wasn't the core of the problem. I could easily add new features and replace components with new implementations without breaking the app. All those "good code quality" identifiers were there.

Turn out the problem is Java. Or to be more specific: Java 1.6
Every listener which only calls a single function once a worker has finished needs 6 lines of code. If you implement the inferface in the class it gets messy once there are multiple workers and you have a generic interface. And there are no lambdas!

So I made the switch to Kotlin.
The app was converted to kotlin in 30 Minutes​. Android studio can convert the classes automatically and very little manual work is needed afterwards.
After that I spent 2 hours replacing the old java concepts with Kotlin concepts: lamdas, non-nullable types, getters and setters in kotlin style (which in this case is c# style) and some other great thing.
The code is good looking now. I like it. I like kotlin as it has a lot of cool things.
Its super easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to get into it. It combines concepts from java, javascript, c# and maybe a few other languages to form a modern jvm 1.6 compatible typesafe language.

Android dev is fun again!

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

End user when criticizing a developer for 'taking long' to create something of value from scratch:
(4 hours later): "What's taking you so damn long? Are you retarded?"

Oh I don't know, maybe I have to make sure that tests in my code run well, maybe I have to evaluate everything to meet the custom satisfactions of the user for his ever-so-custom requirements and I also have to make sure I discard what they don't like? And maybe it takes time to deliver a quality product, and so on?
Or would you prefer I deliver an untested product that I didn't bother to think about and I haven't bothered to make sure it matches with their requirements?

What end users don't understand is the involvement in a quality product.

The feeling when random dudes downvote a question, because a guy who finally earned some points on SO dared to format the code with `<code>`<br> He pasted code, log, even explained a little bit and ~500 point guy even flags it like _unclear_ although there's clearly visible import error.

I mean... as an answerer or moderator, I'd be damn ashamed for such behavior! I have absolutely no problem kick a person with words + explanation in my answer or comment, so that (s)he remembers to ask better questions and feels bad about that, because nooby questions are already answered so many times there.

But to downvote because of formatting even if you have a permission to edit and a flag for low quality or because you can't read ~40 lines of log makes you just a retard and hurt the whole remaining community of guys like me who find time to sit there and answer questions to help another people.

Fuckin accurate

Just like my client :/

These ambiguous frequent changes fuck my code quality :|

It's making me really anxious that I have to cut down on UI/UX as well as code quality just to meet my deadline.

Step 1. Learn to code .
Step 2. Exchange code for money.
Step 3. Exchange money for car, soap & a clean shirt.
Step 4. Profit.
[GOTO: Step #1]

Lol. OK on a serious note coding improved my love life, it drastically reduced the frequency of dates - but dramatically improved the quality and duration of my relationships.
I used to believe that anyone/thing had the potential to be great - and (like me) all they needed was a little time to seize an opportunity.
This essentially meant there were no deal breakers and I spent a lot of time giving people benefit of the doubt and investing a lot of time & effort supporting and trying to build on aspirations that would turn out to simply be fantasies I was indulging.

I still idealistically believe that everything/one has infinite potential - only now I know which problems are worth solving, which are purely for fun or a thought experiment and which should immediately be thrown out and refactored.

All the ambition in the world is void without drive.

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

I carry the same mindset as an aspiring programmer as I did when I was a music major. There were times I practice for hours and got very little out of it in terms of quality (because I wasn't interested, focused or willing) and then there were times I practiced for 20 mins and really made progress on the piece. So I always keep that in mind to save me time and to produce better code overall.

So a non programmer friend of mine needed an in house time tracking tool and found one on codecanyon. He bought it for 40$ and asked me if I could provide him some Webspace to host it until they deploy it in house. I said yes and took a look at the code as some stuff wasn't really working. All I can say is "wtf is that pile of crap". Nothing works, it looks like it's written by a first grader and it's UI looks like it was assembled by a chimp (well actually I think chimpanzees could make a better UI). Now I am interested the progress of rewriting that tool for him and I am almost done with all functions that thing should have and even more after 6 hours. I wonder if all stuff on codecanyon has the same quality and if, I am considering this as bonus income...

I've started programming when I was 12. Right now I'm 25. I can clearly say that I'm passionate, I've touched I think almost every "type" of programming ever. From game development, through IoT and finished at eCommerce. I never stop learning.

My workmates are pissing me off. For code review sometimes I'm waiting even 3 days when I've changed like 5-6 files. They don't want to introduce "new" technologies (by new I mean who are existing at least 2-3 years, got stable community). They don't want to refactor some core of the application because it's working - they don't care about it as they can later say "legacy system so this basic feature took me a week".

Code quality means for them "use shorthand syntax, this code is ugly" - the basic shit which can do any linter

When I'm doing code review, I'm checking out to this branch, test it, check if the solution is scalable. Then I make my comments. I just hear "stop bitching about it just approve".

Thank God I've made through interview and I'm going to switch job in next week.

I've taken a year's break from university to work on projects using various languages. For the first half, I've been trying to produce as much as possible. Now, I'm taking my time and producing less. I've gotta say, I'm enjoying it far more now. I feel like I'm learning more and producing better quality code.

I am a senior Android dev, and I have an old colleague (iOS senior dev). We work on the same project, but in every estimation session he pushes a lot on the lower side: he estimates 4h a task that normally takes 6h or 8h, and the reason is that he has no social life. Right after work he starts working again from home (I can see all his commits), he also works almost entire weekends. I would say he works as average 12/13 h per day.
I don t want to work extra time (unpayed).
About him, it is his life, so I don t care...but at the same time this makes me pressure. I care a lot about quality of code, and I don t want to sacrifice it just for catching up. Most of the people in the team know that he works a lot extra time.

How would you handle this?

Why is source code so crappy? May career is not the longest, buy in my 8 years I talked to so many developers and every one told me how important quality, standards, tests and architecture are - but every codebase I've seen is lacking all of it. Everything is running on constant live support.

I don't get it. It is like I live in a world where everyone does know what has to be done, but no-one does it. I suspect it is because people are lazy, lying and won't say no but that's also not a world I want to live in.

When you're judged by the number of lines you wrote/commits you pushed/any other non relevant stat rather than your code quality

Work of a my co-workers good work! It's called colspan you dumb fuck! Best part is that no way I'm changing this coz I work in place where they don't give a fuck about code quality! So fuck it!

I have a 4S I leave lying around and most apps are dogs on it or crash.

Not DevRant app, though. Pretty solid. Impressive job.

Was helping my dad with his Arduino project when I realized something beautiful about being a programmer.

I have never worked with Arduinos and I'm clueless about hardware stuff but I was still able to debug, go through documentation, example code and fix the issues.

Programming is equally about the passion, dedication and ability + curiosity to solve a new problem as is writing some piece of quality code.

I might have taken a while to realize it but it sure is a wonderful feeling.

(I guess the Question category is the best for this)

Do you believe that someone can be a good dev even if they write shit code?

I personally do, if that person acknowledges the fact that their code is shit, wants to improve it, is humble, is always in the search for constructive, etc as in to make their code better and more readable, I'd think they are a pretty good dev.

You have angered code quality cthulhu!

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.

A friend of mine wrote a Rubik's cube timer in c# as suggested by me for him to practice. This was so terrible....There were lines like:

start.Stop();

I already had a previous succesful interview the day before and just went to my current employer out of decency.
The previous day gave me so much confidence, that I dominated the complete interview and asked them what they could offer me, that I would choose them.

On my way home they send me a text how much they were interested in me and that they will show me code as I demanded.

I took the job because the were as much interested in quality, as I am.

Code quality as measured in WTFs/minute.

I've found a job as a junior developer several months ago, but I really want to find another job...

I know, my knowledge and skills aren't superior yet, but I am tired of that feeling of being useless.. I constantly self-educate myself after work and university, but still, I often need to ask co-workers "where's this form?", "wtf is that", "how do I access this"... Plus, their projects are HUGE, but no matter how big the project is, there are 2 to 4 people working on each at a time. And 1 person may work on 2-3 projects. And we are usually late for deadlines :/

Also code quality is meh..
Me: Why do we implement it here?
Co-worker: oh, we don't actually use it, it's just to hide warnings and pass the test.

Holy shit, wtf, I've spent half day trying to figure out wtf is this and why is it not working :/

Found in adafruit dht library....
force is not used.

I was mentoring a group of students and helping them with their graduation project. I taught them NodeJS, MongoDB & few other things.

One time, one of them came to show me her code, and it has the weirdest and most bizarre structure ever!

I asked her, “who told you to structure your code like that? This is wrong! I didn’t teach you this way!”.

She replies: “<<a local shitty tech startup name>>’s CTO”

When I searched about him, he’s a civil engineer who founded a startup and assigned himself as CTO with no technical background or knowledge whatsoever! FFS students believe that he’s a real CTO and started learning from him 😑 His code was so bad in every way that a fresh would write a better code!

One of my TL said to me during code review that place a break statement after return statement in switch case.

Being with a bar leader can certainly degrade your code quality.

Code review?......... what's that?

Joke apart, We literally don't do that in my workplace, only few people care about code quality and what they are pushing to production

Some nice music. (Best OMFG)
And just the happiness of creating.
You need to have that feeling that you cant describe when you are coding to create quality code.
Without it the code is pretty ok its just not 100% but about 90%.

Company is about to get certified to ISO 9001:

Kick-off meeting with consultant announced weeks ago, mandatory for all employees.
Everyone is kind of joking about it, but also looking forward to certain workflows maybe changing to the better.

Two hours before meeting, told by CTO not to attend.

Some code I hadn't touched for half a year needs urgent patching to make the equipment pass EMC test (doing so within a few hours would help us save the lab cost for another day of testing).

When they applied RF noise to the bus lines, the CAN peripheral would glitch and need reset, this should happen covertly the first few times without raising any error to the user, so they could just finish the testing without being disturbed by the error - and the EMC lab will not test the functionality of the device after all.

The irony when you were actually supposed to learn about quality that day...

My senior and I started pair programming to improve my code quality. He likes it and I find it fun (and convenient that he helps me) but it feels like I'm making him do my work. I also fear that I am too horrible to be trusted with code alone but if that was the case they would kick me out right?

Introducing the unified standard of quality measurement.

WTFs/Minute

is a new standard coming from code reviews, which also applies to movies, porn, women, ....

what's your opinion ?

Just going through some old code from git repo's and code examples and I have a message to every dev out there after seeing some of the code quality...

Never... ever... ever fucking give variables with names like vx, tr and sq.

Give your variables names that explain what they are, it is so fucking hard trying to follow code that has 2 letter variable names and there is a special place in hell for you :-)

So I got this new job as Java developer, the people are really great but is the kind of companies that only takes care for fast results and not for code quality.

Because this I have to deal with libraries updated 4 years ago, classes with 8000 lines, methods with 500 lines, a WHOLE lot of work arounds because there is no time to really fix the issue unless it affects directly the customer (something not working or being really slow) aaand we use fucking svn.

Some of this practice's they know and encourage it (+1000 lines classes for example) and every time I try to talk about good practices in the code everyone seems so interested but there is always no time.

Sooo I will stay here for at least two years, I hope I can make a change for good in their code smells.

Domain at it again. Left a foo bar guys. Quality development yet again

I don't have anything to say about getting a dev job in some company. But I can give some tips on attracting clients for your freelance work.

* Have a few projects of your own hosted on Github to show off your quality code.

* Contribute to others' open source projects if possible.

* Get yourself a nice website and showcase all your work.

* Ask your current clients to write testimonials on your work and post it in your website.

* Be nice to your clients. Chances are they'll refer you to their friends and family.

That's pretty much all I've done and I get more freelance dev requests than I could take.

I hate those morons who do QA by simply clicking around. You are a disgrace to people like me who like to code and still enjoy doing testing.
Get a life you fuckers. You are the sole reason why many people in industry thinks that QA is something anybody can do.

Yes, I agree you can test the application, but in no way you could ensure the quality of the product.

Anybody can code, But not a quality code.

When I was about 10, I used to read these magazines with code listings for programs, and the only things I really understood were these text adventures that I imagined to be of Zork-like quality (gasp!). In reality, it was more like the choose-your-own adventure books of the time (which were actually pretty cool, and had pretty tight memory management). At one time, on a vacation somewhere in the eighties, I got tired of playing in the river with my friends and instead opted to continue writing lines of BASIC in a little paper notebook, inside my parents' car (at 34 degrees C), trying to perfect a storyline about my little brother and his pet dog he got for his most recent birthday, fighting the cat empire etcetera etcetera. Weird looks, good times.

It's nice reading other people's code. Make you realize that your not too shabby quality wise!

Was going through old photos from university time and...I present to you the result of deadline + lack of sleep + boredom + shitty university project because somebody decided that CS folks needed to learn webdev in old ASP.NET.

Yes that is one query. I wrote the entire thing out as a string in my C# program in one go and tested it by running it from the program. Must've worked properly because I got them grades so eh. I recall I had one nested seven levels too (this is just 5) but I can't find a photo of it. These two queries did all the business logic. Yeah.

Apologies for the poor quality photo of the screen, I don't have the code so no screenshot, this is just from my photos archive

How seriously do you take TDD, CI/CD, automated testing, clean commits, good architecture, Agile, low coupling/high cohesion, etc ... ?

How much time do you invest in those things if you have a deadline up ahead?

Have you seen these things being valued or disregarded at the previous companies you worked for?

Fuck my project manager. He wants to sacrifice code quality, test coverage and technical debt in favor of more features. In the future when everything takes longer or breaks guess who is responsible? Certainly not him.

I'm a junior dev, been on placement a year.

I get tasks done mostly on time, my pull requests are merged, yet I still feel like what I'm writing is seriously under quality.

What point will I stop writing code that isn't good enough to not be stressed about? 😷

I have a co-worker that reports problems by saying "this is broken" or "your change looks bad" and nothing else. There's no recognition for hard work on my team in general, but this guy is a gadfly minus the Socratic benefits.

Did you improve code quality across the project? He'll complain about a function you wrote because he doesn't like how it looks in the code when called.

Did you go out and meet stakeholders so you can learn what your team is supposed to have in the way of milestones and a timeline? He'll complain that it's all impossible and offer no alternatives, solutions or really any new context.

Did you follow your designer's advice on how to handle a corner case in your software? He'll chastise the fact you committed the code to do it in the next meeting because of how bad it looks.

Did you catch him doing one of the things he complains about? He'll complain about you holding up the pull request when we all have to keep moving.

Are you trying to get a task-related question answered in a meeting? He'll interject a sudden argument about code and how easy it is... when he thinks you'll be the one to do it. Very quiet when no one's name is on it, or his name is on it.

Any advice on how to handle guys like this?

Do you think Code will be able to write itself one day ? In good quality a bit more then google did already ?

I like the thinking of i can describe a computer program what i want and it codes that for me. But at the same time for example i dont think it will work too well. For example i see every day when i drive new situations that an ai cant be trained for. example car crashes or blocked roads with no lines between them because they get renewed.

And if so how many years would it take from now on ? To have ai on the same level like a human brain if that is even possible.

Oh great...
I am slowly beginning to realize that my boss/manager doesn't care about refactoring at all. He cares about features and resolved tickets and thats why the code is a pile of spaghetti filled with hacks to fit every clients desires.
Also all of my coworkers work for themselves, ticket by ticket, either because they just don't care or because they are so frustrated that they don't care anymore. And here I am, an intern, and they expect me to cope with this deformed clutter of legacy designs, buried under hacks and workarounds, while implementing some new feature which in the end I have to put on top of everything else because nothing of that codebase can be reused. Fucking shit, fucking irresponsible managers who dont think about the quality of their product.

Spent 2 days refactoring code written by our "offshore team". I've done refactoring on the same code in the past, probably upto about a week in total of refactoring now. The code looked like it was written by someone who had literally just finished their first "Hello World" app - loads of code blocks copied and pasted instead of declaring reusable functions.
The whole thing should have been done by us in the first place.
And yet our money-conscious company wants to employ more of these developers. Cheaper than us? Sure. Quantity over quality though, but I guess money is all that matters to the big cheese

I'm deploying right now before vacation because I apparently hate myself :)

Actually, it's worse than that.
The deploy was supposed to be Jan 15th.
I was told yesterday the client wants it live before New Year's (probably to impress his boss.)

But I'm leaving town today. Driving. For 8+ hours straight.
So I had to not only pull an all-nighter and finish the alpha-quality code overnight, I had to write up detailed instructions on how to deploy the sensors in the field and calibrate the antennas so we start getting data streamed to our portal, so that someone else can try to do the install for me.
Fml
Can't finish the code after I get home cause I have to burn the ROM to the board and hand it off before I go.

> do you feel sorry for freelancing contractors
> whose previous client abandoned them
> they ask you to help them fix some trivial bugs in the shitty code
> you believe you can change the world by going overboard by also improving the code quality, along with fixing the bugs
> initialize an empty file where you'll translate the shitty code into a more organized one
> start creating variables and generic functions which can be used in a modular and organized fashion
> meticulously document the first function you write
> realize this is not worth your time
> insert some glue code into the original code which fixes the trivial bugs
> glue code has hard coded values so it adds to the shittiness of the code
> submit the work
> get $$$

So just saw an email from our team's vice manager about need to improve code quality by using some new system.

Well that set me off on a huge rant about all the issues I see in my team and what exactly needs to change... (just some new sytem he's pushing isnt going to help)

wonder if i might get fired... even though i m right...

And so much for my plan to update docs... I've forgot what I wanted to do...

Worst experience?
Fourth semester. Programming project.
We were 4 persons, I did almost all the work (including fixing the stuff they broke) but that's not the point.

One of them somehow killed our git repo at least once per weak. It was really annoying, because I had to fix it.

Also he named *all* of his commits 'Pfuschpush' (Pfusch is German for botch). And the code had exactly this quality. I often had to rewrite everything he did (or simply revert the commit).

Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.

That feeling when the code in a massive PR is of very high quality... Only comment is about some class name...

For the first time apart from Data Structures and Algorithms, there was a Machine Coding round where they asked me to create a small app using any language without data persistence or GUI, to see my code designing ability, LLD, code quality, whether I can implement OOP and write modular code and to see how extensible my code will be.

I did well.

Code Quality

Today I finally experienced the power of something I learned in university: propositional and predicate logic.

Many developers I know think that such education is useless. Well, today I have proven that it is very useful. On a day to day basis, working on banking software, complexity in purely logic is very low. However, we have a screen that must show or hide elements based on some input values and conditions associated with certain elements. How hard can that be, right? Well, there are many variables to take into account and as such it's absolutely not trivial.

This screen didn't work properly and maintaining the code is hard as there is a lot of logic to show/hide, enable/disable things and so on. After quite some time and attempts by fellow developers, I decided to refactor the whole thing. I'm responsible for the quality of the software and it was quite degrading, so I had to do something.

In order to get things working properly, I defined collections of constants (ui elements) and predicates. Then, I defined for which element what predicates must be true, in order to hide/show, disable/enable etc. I then translated these predicates into code. And guess what? It works! Of course it works. It's logic. But I'm very pleased I finally could actually use some of all the math I studied!

If you have no defined business processes whatsoever nor code quality practices, why bother putting on the job offer "software engineer" or "full stack web developer"?

WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR IS A FUCKING PHP HACKER

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

One day a week should be for improving the quality of the code, not just bugfixing and rushed implementation of new features.

I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.

Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.

While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us

Start the reading of "clean code".
First thing that i have learn "The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minutes".
What do you think about it ? Agree or not ?

I coded part of feature 2 months ago.

Left it to help frontend guy a bit, deal with fire after release. ( we’re missing frontend integration tests and every release is pain in the ass ).

My backend code coverage is about 80% so not much can go wrong at this point.

So I added more code today and it looks like new feature is working but don’t know what the code I added 2 months ago exactly do.

The only thing I know is that it definitely needs refactoring ...

Being only backend dev / release manager / administrator/ dev ops in project is painful I need to deal with everything on my own 😔

At least client doesn’t care if it’s done in one week or in one month right now.

This climate crisis is slowly getting into my head guys😠. The shit bolsanaro and all other govs are doing is effecting my mojo.

I am working here and trying to do my best to deliver quality code while i must fight the feeling that ppl are betraying me (the govs). Its not my job to remind them of not fucking us over. I try to help by not becoming a criminal and getting forward with my life. Wtf is wrong with those in charge of govs?! On any project if you ignore the signs, u'll end up in refactoring hell or the project just dies. Getting out takes serious commitment.
Is everyone just gone crazy?

Here we all will get fucked, if we fail with project earth. 🤬😖👿

!rant
when you find 3 spelling errors in the same line of code and realize that these are legit 'cause the objects and methods are actually coded misspelled.

That's when no one dare doing code review but simply it builds and its fine.

Luckily #NotMyCode

Recently, I failed a lot. Most of them were interviews. Some failed at code challenge. Some of them were leet code type challenge. Some failed at less quality vs other people. Used to be ashamed or angry. Now able to embrace it. Thanks to jack ma's documentary. Start to integrated his philosophy into life.

Node: The most passive aggressive language I've had the displeasure of programming in.

Reference an undefined variable in a module? Prepare to waste your time hunting for it, because the runtime won't tell you about it until you reference a property or method on the quietly undefined module object.

Think you know how promises work? As a hiring manager, I've found that less than 5% of otherwise well-experienced devs are out of the Dunning Kruger danger zone.

Async causes edge cases and extra dev effort that add to the effort required to make a quality product.

Got a bug in one of your modules? Prepare yourself for some downtime because a single misplaced parentheses can take out the entire Node process, killing unrelated pages and even static file hosting.

All this makes for a programming experience that demands much higher cognitive load, creates more categories of bugs, and leads to code bloat/smell much more quickly than other commonly substituted languages.

From a business perspective, the money you save on scaling (assuming your app is more compute efficient under Node) is wasted on salaries and opportunity costs stemming from longer dev time, more QA, and more frequent outages.

IMO, Node is an awesome experiment, a fun language, a great tool for specific use cases, and a terrible fucking choice for an entire website.

Python ecosystem drives me nuts!

Not the language tho, i kinda like it, and some features are damn straight awesome.

But ecosystem... man!

The way ppl write code in it, the lack of documentation (or in quality of it)...

I recently wanted to check how library does one thing (debug purposes), and not only i had to track some method up 3 classes, the other method i hunted only by signature and still i have no idea how it ends up being accessible where it should...

"Explicit is better than implicit" my ass...

Also dev managed to make the code very unreadable. In Python. Language with such strong opinions about code formatting. HOW ?!!

And the worst part is, it wasn't that big of a library and didn't really need the full freaking Enterprise OOP treatment with layers over layers of generally named classes and fucked up architecture.

FUCK THAT LIB, FUCK THAT DEV, FUCK IT ALL !!!

PS.
Project seems to be abandoned for a year or two, so there is hardly an option to fix things with the author sadly :(

Quality != more work + less talk

Quality = more talk resulting in less work.

That makes no sense mathematically.

“Let’s talk more about shit before we create shit”.

That’s a little better.

“Let’s talk more so we don’t create shit”.

Getting closer.

“Let’s talk more about what is needed till we all know what is best before we program a damn machine?”

...This is going nowhere fast.

Okay fuck it. Let’s just code some stuff. It’s more enjoyable.

Commit functional changes separately to code quality changes

Otherwise I'll make you do it all over again 😤

...is that someone who finds some, let's say, questionable quality code that I've written in previous roles, finds me again and calls me out on it...

- finish that ML course I started back in June 2017
- get more experience from my job
- improve my code quality even better.
- build some cool project in Java ( there's this company I need to impress, but I haven't found any good idea to implemen 😣)
- be more active on Hackerrank
- do some stuff here and there
- use that freaking LinkedIn to create some meaningful connections
- contribute to an open source project
Hmmm ...
... yeah that's a lot ... *sigh*

generally, the quality of code is inversely proportional to the number of public booleans

thing.IsThatTypeOfThing
thing.IsAVerySpecificTypeOfThatThing
thing.CanDoSomething
thing.EnableSomething

apparently that's where we're heading now :/

!rant

I've always been wondering why do tech companies need everyone to have a strong grasp of algos and data structures?

I've been coding most of my life but didn't get a CS degree so ended up in IT but I kind of want to get into a tech company as my thinking is the quality of code much higher (I spend a lot of time cleaning up other people's code and prod issues over the years...), I've been learning Algo/DS but when I see those technical questions on CareerCup, I go WTF.... it's this the kind of problems you guys do every day?

My app is finally on the Apple App Store.

The rant: how bloody difficult was it to get on there?! They scrutinise EVERYTHING. My promo copy, my screengrabs and also it seems that there is code that works on iPhone that doesn’t work on iPad.

I thought it was designed to be the same for ease of development? However I found a function that works perfectly well on iPhone but breaks iPad.

Anyway I guess in the long run this keeps the App Store’s quality level high and it isn’t the Wild West like the google play store. However it’s still pretty annoying. I can see why devs get angry about Apple’s process.

!rant

So this has probably been asked loads of times but I've never seen it. When working on solo projects for yourself do you still use source control like git or mercurial?

I usually don't because when I do personal projects its usually filthy and fast development to prototype quickly.

However, this current project I'm working on I am using git and I'm finding that slowing myself down just to follow good practice is actually improving my code quality and my understanding of my own project.

Following my first rant, my boss had the brilliant idea of running the old and the new architecture in parallel. I had advised that it won’t be ideal since the same Scala code was ingesting into 2 different Kinesis streams and one was running an old KCL written in Java where as other was consumed by a Firehose delivery stream(eventually we will be ingesting it into Firehose directly). I had told few manual + automated tests on Code as well as from a functionality of the new architecture and a set of tests for checking the integration of the new Producer code with Consumer.

The statement I got from my boss was “This is the test, we test it on production in parallel”. My boss had a brilliant idea to fucking test the new code on the production directly but running them in parallel without accounting for undefined behaviour it might cause in the current production system. I mean my boss should get a Nobel peace prize for shattering our mental peace.

Anywho, we started the deployment today at 5AM in the morning. I had all the aws services deployed. Was just waiting to deploy the new Collector code which we did at 5AM. Immediately after 5 minutes the system went bonkers, there was fire, blood, demons and I was smoking a cigarette with the biggest “I told you so smile” on my face. I’ve just written an email to my boss and have told him calmly that “Listen motherfucker, 90 percent of the software companies aren’t idiots to focus on testing and quality. We need to start spending time on testing and quality else we’ll again be in the same soup after few weeks again”.waiting for his reply

I felt so good after revisiting a project and everything runs ok
Code readable
Managed to pick off where I left off and fixed some existing bugs
Added new features and uploaded the update