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

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:

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

I actually hate this job, seems like there's not a single project with decent code abstraction. Everything is a fucking spaghetti like:

```
// we only care about e-mail fields, which are odd
isValid(index) {
if(!(index%2)) {
return true;
}
...
}
```

Like MOTHERFUCKER, WHAT BUSINESS RULE DOES THIS SHITCODE REFLECTS?!?! WHY CAN'T YOU SHITHEADS WRITE PROPER BUSINESS ABSTRACTION RATHER THAN JUST COLLEGE-GRADUATE QUALITY SHITCODE.

FUCKING KILL ME ALREADY I SHOULD HAVE INSTEAD BECAME A PSYCHIC CAUSE I'M SURELY GOOD AT GUESSING WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK THIS FUCKING FUCKCODE INTENDS TO ACHIEVE.

AND YOU CALL YOURSELF TOP-NOTCH DEV CAUSE THIS IS JAVASCRIPT... YOU KNOW WHAT, SHITHEADS LIKE YOU, WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT OTHER THAN GLOBALLING EVERY FUCKING NPM LOCAL PACKAGE IS WHY GOOD ENGINEER LIKE US GET SHIT FROM PHPEPSI ZENDFRAMESHIT FUCKHEADS DEVS.

DO YOU THINK YOUR COMMENT WAS HELPFUL??? DO I LOOK LIKE A BUSINESS GRADUATE FUCKTARD WHO DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THE MODULE OPERATOR IS??? I WANT TO KNOW WHY YOU WROTE THAT SHITFUCK INSTEAD OF WHAT IT DOES; THE REASON I'M READING YOUR POORLY WRITTEN MODULE OPERATOR SOAP-OPERA IN THE FIRST PLACE IS CAUSE I KNOW WHAT IT'S DOING, IT'S BREAKING SHIT.

OH AND ONE MORE THING, FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCKSHIT SHITFUCK FUCk

Your code is your karma 😅

The actual metrics to evaluate the quality of code 😂

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.

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.

---- 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? ☺️

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

I'm hiring and I'm fucking done with recruiters buttering up skills etc and sending me BS candidates.

Interview earlier today...
CV: MySql skill level 10 (out of 10)
Reality: Can't write a simple JOIN!

Yesterday...
CV: PHP 6+ years exp, self proclaimed ninja/jedi/oracle.
Reality:
[Me]: Write me a function to map an array to x.
[Ninja]: What's an array?

I've come to the conclusion that the type of dev I want on my team is highly unlikely to be looking for work much less using some piece of shit shady agent to find work so I need to hunt him / her down personally and can use the phenomenally large recruiters fee as a hiring bonus / incentive.

Only problem now is finding quality full stack devs in the area (Johannesburg, South Africa).

I'm thinking of posting a 'challenge' job add to filter out good candidates - some kind of code challenge to be solved that gives them my contact info. Any one have any creative ideas I could try?

just another day at office working on legacy code.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

When I show someone my code

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:

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

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.

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.

!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!!

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.

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...

I am that colleague that writes bad quality code

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

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.

I joined a company 6 months ago.
No CTO.
No development process.
Spagetti code.
Takes loads of new requirements on top.

Later
I advised the software head and managing director on how to improve our software development process.
New tools
Less requirement good quality software
New products and micro services.

Both of them agreed but they said they are waiting for new CTO to confim as an authority and responsibility.

Well I cant do much just to do my work.

1 month ago new CTO joined
Revised whatever I advised and implementing it right. I like it.

Got my confirmation after 6 months instead of 3 months.

CTO called me in for review and gave me 2/5. And said you need to improve more.

I asked him, in what do I need to improve.
He replies in technologies and development process.
And he takes credit for all changes and implementation.

I argued about it. I already suggested what you did but was ignore because we didnt have CTO.
Hes like ignored me.
Fucking you CTO.

Gotta love XKCD Fridays

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. 😉

Fuck off cancerous piece of shit on stackoverflow whose dick is an obvious inverse proposition to ego and incapablility to read.

I asked if there's "clean" way, of doing something. I provided my solution to the problem

Your answer and coments make it pretty obvious that you:
* don't really care about (code) quality
* value your reputation just as much as some teen on facebook sucking cook for likes or whatever they use now
* downvoted my question because you can't handle critique in the slightest
* You immediately replied with "but op said..." even though I am the fucking op and if I say _imo_ a fucking for-loop within function is less readable than 3 chained function-calls it and does not include the feature I asked for, it means you have to justify your answer and not get triggered and downvote my fucking question.

After I confronted him about this shit he just said "If you had studied the language for more than 10 minutes you would have known than you can't do that."

And if you had some a basic reading skill you could improve my workaround or tell me just that, instead of providing me with that useless information you vomited out just to get some ez SO reputation.

Piece of shit didn't even deny the anyyhing.

Shove a vibrator up your ass until it arrives at your skull and activate it. Maybe that will stimulate your brain or hopefully upgrade it.

I don't care how much "reputition" you may have "earned" on the internet. I am not afraid to call your bullshit or your sheer pathetic existence out.

People like this are are the reason SO gets so much hsge and even tough I got an improved version for my workaround (from an other user), I'm nowhere near happiness.

Note, the Useful-to-retarded-ratio is
1: 3

This is how you know you write good code

Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————

My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:

1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)

2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)

3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)

4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull

5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video

6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time

7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)

8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed

9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button

10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)

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.

"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.

"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

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

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".

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.

Windows troubleshooting:
- Works on my system, therefore it's not an issue.
- Must be a hardware error.
- Obviously it's just cheap hardware.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
- Here's some obscure error code that leads nowhere.
- Have you tried "sfc /scannow"?
AS IF SFC IS A FUCKING SILVER BULLET!!!
- Our Indian support chap from answers.microsoft.com will help you.

RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Solution: quietly weep and reinstall your system.

Linux troubleshooting:
- There are good quality log files.
- You can run the program from the command-line and read both stdout and stderr from it.
- You can usually run the program with high verbosity options to help you track down the error.
- Even daemons can have their commands spawned from a dedicated shell, to see why they failed.
- Usually it's a configuration error and you can easily edit the configuration file.
- More often than not, the program will tell you why it failed.

Solution: usually easy to find.

I fucking love Windows. Because you know, it's so easy to troubleshoot and the support is so great!!!

Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?

Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.

Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).

So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.

He refuses.

So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...

I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.

Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.

Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.

Moral of the story is, some people are retards.

!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++;

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.

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

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!!!!! 😱

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

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

What's the point?

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.

1. Slack. Pretty good chat app for dev companies, I use it to prevent people standing next to my desk 40 times a day.

2. Unit testing tools, especially when fully automated using a git master branch hook, something like codeship/jenkins, and a deployment service.

3. Jetbrains IDEs. I love Vim, but Jetbrains makes theming, autocompleting & code style checks with mixed templating languages a breeze.

4. Urxvt terminal. It's a bit of work at the start, but so extremely fast and customizable.

5. Cinnamon or i3. Not really dev tools, but both make it easy to organize many windows.

6. A smart production bug logger. I tend to use Bugsnag, Rollbar or Sentry.

7. A good coffee machine. Preferably some high pressure espresso maker which costs more than the CEO's car, using organic fairtrade hipster beans with a picture of a laughing south american farmer. And don't you dare fuck it up with sugar.

8. Some high quality bars of chocolate. Not to consume yourself, but to offer to coworkers while they wait for you to fix a broken deploy. The importance of office politics is not to be underestimated.

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

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.

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.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Use Meaningful variable names, they said.

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

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?

How often does this happen????

Then they can't blame us for code quality.

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

!dev，

I have a baby. He doesnt like sleeping. He has GERD (reflux).

He rarely sleep more than 2 hours at a time (probably 1 a week).

The best he has ever slept in his 11month of living was 5 hours. That day he was sick and he ended up in hospital.

All good， he is still alive and well.

But he goes down at 7pm and wakes every 2 hours if not less.

Somestimes he is easy to put down and thongs are bearable， but many times it can take up to 30-45 minutes to out him down.

I dev during the day but i am longing to have nights where i can completly concrntrate. But my partner has been survivjng on broken sleep for about a year now.

She lets me have longer stretches but i either stay up late and havr to feed the baby and jiggle him， which breaks concentration and has pbliged me to get an extra desk and screento be put into an uncomfortable place so i could code at home (my orfice is a rent out 10msquare batch in the garden).

Or sometimes i just get up at 3 or 4am so that he can sleep on me 2eme i can jiggle him when he wakes.

I cant deal with being woken every 2 hours. I throw tantrums like im a 7 year old.

Ive rarely had such a sucking life quality as now.

Its a good things babies a cute i tell you that!!!!

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...

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'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'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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

FML

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 :)

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.

One of my current freelance jobs is to "save" a project for an agency.

I was called because they kinda wasted money with two developers who did nothing (or did worse than nothing) and the client became really pissed off.

There was, though, a quite big problem (for me) with this project: it uses Kentico CMS (C#/ASP.Net Web Forms) and I have no previous experience with both CMS and languages it uses.

In the end, I accepted because of money 😏 (and to not put a stain in my name with some people i know 😅).

Bear in mind that I'm a self-taught coder, still on the noob side, and I doubted if I would be capable of doing it (and I still doubt if I did some quality job in it, or need to improve stuff).

I don't know if it was my previous attempts at learning Haxe or Java, touching the C# code felt pretty familiar, though I hated the whole process (there might be at least 1 rant about it :P) of developing this project because of tons of stuff (the way things work with the CMS, ASP.NET Web Forms, the way it handles layouts, the way it loads things, did I say ASP.NET Web Forms already?).

I'm just relieved now because I received an e-mail that the client reeeally calmed down, the project's almost done and needs just some adjustments before it's sent for homologation.

Now it mostly needs content.

And I can also properly sleep.

YAY.

I remember a bad freelance experience.

It was a sophisticated mobile applications (many UI, many customization, many APIs to integrate with). since the client have many future freelance projects, I give him 3 weeks as estimation time, and one day per week I work on its place to evaluate the progress and sync our work.

I worked hard, the quality was excellent.. but he kept ask for "small" changes and "small" features.. at first it was OK, and I was planning to give him a good example to profit from his future projects.. but he toke advantage for that and the same app extended from 3 weeks to 2 months and more.. he barely added a little to the initial price..

So what I did? I uploaded the code to a private repository in Bitbucket, added him to the team.. I wrote few lines how to sign and publish the app.. aand disappeared.
his luck, I disappeared from the country, I immigrated to another country for best job opportunity.

Backstory:
So, yesterday was first time I worked with other developers in like 4 years. I am in Scotland to integrate my library into our Epicor ERP system. I am working with another developer from our company from a different department.

I have always been worried about how fast I can create solutions, I always thought I was a slower than average developer.

I haven't worked on a team or with other developers in years, so I don't have anyone to gauge my performance against. I really have no baseline to judge where I am at on the spectrum of developer experience and efficiency.

It has always made me slightly worried about switching jobs because I am worried about thinking I am better than I actually am, getting a job with a much higher salary, then failing to perform as expected.

After working with this other developer, he is very methodical and meticulous, but sooooo slow!

In fact I was getting anxious just watching him implement simple routines. I cannot judge his code as it was just implementing my library and some debugging, but if the average developer works at that pace, I am a developer god!

One thing I did notice, is, the code he writes probably has much less bugs in it initially than the code I would write. Generally I go through and fix those bugs and expand on the code after I publish, I would be almost sure, he would have less issues with his code, but it would take 2 extra weeks to get his code out vs mine. I could churn out something much more quickly and get it to the same quality standards within a few hours after I've published and get feedback. (generally I cannot stand testing, so I publish and let everyone else (users) test for me and push fixes out immediately.

So are you slow and methodical? or quick and dirty? which one is more preferred in the industry?

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.

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 only valid measurement of code quality

So... Yeah... Code quality

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 🤷‍♂️

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.

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!

"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 🤔

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

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.

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?

Part 3: today has become a blog post.

WARNING: this is loooooooooooong

Background is my boss and I were talking about hiring the right people, also generalists vs specialists.

Essentially John and I are the specialists. When something goes wrong it ends up escalating to either him or me. But this is not sustainable as I can't handle the stress and most likely he eventually won't either.

And this goes back to general hiring standards.

All the good people leave and the remaining ones are stuck with all the problems and eventually for one reason or another they leave as well... or the code keeps getting worse... until someone decides to scrap everything and build a new one... But now the only people left to lead teams are monkeys.

Now current problem is the only person that can replace me is John and the only person that can replace John, at least in handling issues, is me...

It's a certain type of person, people that have a growth mindset and can pick things up.

Google and strong tech companies are full of these types of people where if needed there's always someone that can step in and help. They have the background and the ability to quickly learn. This also lets them innovate and identify and solve new problems.

I think that's what the technical interviews are for, to find these types of people.

And you really can't train this. I'm not sure how effective our "new" training program on high quality development is but I'm guessing it's not. Excellence has to be in the culture and it's not something that can be built overnight or by randomly hiring people.

So in a sense, tech companies aren't really paying well, they're paying cost to what their hires are really worth, after they've verified it, and enough to keep them from leaving.

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.

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

!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!

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...

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 :|

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...

So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..

But, my advice is quite simple:

"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.

The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...

It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..

This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..

Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..

By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..

Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..

Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..

Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...

Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...

Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...

Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..

Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..

And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..

And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.

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.

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...

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.

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

One thing i like to do while coding is listen to conference talks from people smarter than me, so i can subconsciously grow some "coding genius" region of my brain while I work.

Was watching a talk where the presenter was saying how developers today don't know how to program objects. (OK fine, I don't) That Object Orientation had become dehumanized. (Ok, seems true.) Then the speaker went on to say that "TDD will kill you" and mentioned authors who had done studies on the topic. (Uhh..???) I searched, did not find those authors, and only found scholarly papers supporting TDD in at least finding that automated testing improves code quality. I stopped watching after that.

So just a note that not every talk should be gobbled up just because the person fits some image.

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.

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 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.

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.

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();

You have angered code quality cthulhu!

(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.

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

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...

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!

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

Now let me check the line numbers again..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then, there comes more!

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

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

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

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

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

So a few weeks back guy I used to work with contacts me for some dev work on a UK project he is working on, it's the Thursday and they need the thing the coming Monday. I tell him it's totally impossible, and it was so he asks what can done and how much, as well as how much for the entire project.

I stipulate exactly what can be done, with exclusions and say 7.5k and them mail over a detailed quote for 30k for everything.

I get told it's all fine, I must go ahead. I get through a bit more than expected by the Monday, but they still needed something to demo and I set I can get enough for demo in place by Thursday.

They demo to business and money and all that and everyone is happy and tell me to finish up along with some changes, and I don't even adjust the price as it was more work they wanted outside of the original spec.

Get to probably 80% done and they say we need to pause they need to look over other feedback.

Next thing, the PM come back, no they were never actually happy with the quote and they found some other guy willing to do the entire thing for 7.5k and they willing to only give me that for the code I have written so far. Cunts.

Anyway, he tries to take some blame for it, even though I know it's BS and says he will pay in another 7.5k from his share if I am willing and we call it quits.

This people, is why I don't freelance.

I feel sorry for this new kid, he clearly under quoted, and yes I am expensive, but with decades experience having worked on international projects for one of the largest digital asset management firms, my countries leading fintech dev house and now the lead developer for my countries largest insurance software dev house, you damn fucking strait my free time comes at a premium, as you are getting top fucking quality, 100% tested, high performing code.

They can go fuck an entire flock of ducks when they come back after this half ling fucks up the diamond I coded up for them.

Even funnier, they a UK based company, so for them this was a 1.5k project. Cheap cunts.

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 ?

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

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?

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

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 :/

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%.

Code quality as measured in WTFs/minute.

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.

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.

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

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

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 :-)

I seriously don't fucking understand those people who like programming iDevices.

I mean, in my personal experience you have:
- iPhone not connecting to a WiFi (while working on a network project)
- Mac, while using multiple desktops on 2 monitors: I have the 3rd desktop active on the 2nd monitor, search for terminal to open it and it opens in the 1st desktop of the first monitor
- while making an app (ionic or unity), is about 5 to 15 times slower compared to the same android apps (same exact code, but gotta go throught XCode, y'know?)
- takes YEARS to download XCode, but is necessary to even just build for lastest iPhones updated
- takes years to upload to AppStore and when it's done it just tells you "oh bitch, you know what? you forgot that fucking icon for tablets, how about you rebuild it all? and NO, you have to change the build number or I won't accept it"
- App quality was so pedantic on the first publish but then always fucks it up at the second upload, like "hey we checked it the first time, now we can just 100% trust it works and doesn't use anything scammy"
- code+compiled app for iOS is like 1GB while android vode+build is like 100MB WTF do you even put in those 900MB? random trash? WHY?
- I'm not even gonna get into the forums or the amount of money you have to pay for both product and services
- MacOS works ALMOST like Linux, but takes all the worst from both windows and linux to give you the worst performance with the best graphics, but it looks cool, so doesn't matter

A good world would be a world where Apple goes bankrupt after Steve Jobs died

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!

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.

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.

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? 😷

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.

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.

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.

Fixed a high priority bug today just prior to release. There was 100% test coverage. The tests pass both before and after the change. The product behavior is correct now where it wasn't before. Just one more reminder that test coverage does not equate to either quality or correctness. Tests are alarms (at best), and quality of tests are no better an any chunk of code. All tests have costs, but not all have value. All reasons why I am skeptical of the value of code coverage, TDD, or anything that posits that "all tests are good".

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.

> 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 $$$

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.