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Search - "coding standard"
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Me: "Hey, I see you've started your class name with a lowercase letter, It's common practice to start it with a capital letter"
Co-worker that started two weeks ago with almost no experience in c++: "Oh, right. You women and your rules, you must know it then"
Me: *Awkward laugh* *Thinking as long as he changes it i'll let that one slip* *Sends him coding standard guide just in case he doesn't believe me*
-- Two days later --
He still didn't fucking change it. It pains my eyes to look at it each time he asks me for help. Oh and stop calling me "miss", I have a name.46 -
Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?
Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!
Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?
GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!
I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.
it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google
THANK YOU FOR NOTHING
A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.
also, whats up with
AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);
ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????
WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?
Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!
Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!
Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!
THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!
thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.
If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!
fuckers.48 -
During teacher office hours a few years back: if you have questions on your homework, maybe it's too hard and you should switch majors to something easier, many girls do, so there's no shame in it.
I had asked for verification that my standard deviation logic was correct before spending the time coding it and then figuring out what was wrong.
Ps- he's no longer employed by the school for other sexist reasons.28 -
As a full-stack dev who has been looking for a full-time role for over half a year now... How the fuck can it be so difficult to land a job as a dev? I'm a passionate, capable, and proven dev; it shouldn't be this hard.
And why the hell are coding/whiteboard interviews the de-facto standard for deciding if somebody is worthy of a role? Whiteboard interviews are as inadequate and unencompassing a means of determining the quality of a candidate as asking a dentist how well they know the organ structure of the human body.
I've applied to an endless number of positions, so far-reaching and desperate as to even apply to international positions and designer roles instead of developer roles (I've been a graphic designer for over 13+ years). Even with this, most don't get back to you, and the few who do most often just notify you of your rejection. On the rare occasion I land an interview, my chances get fucked up by the absurd questions they ask, as if the things they are asking about are at all an appropriate, all-encompassing measure of what I know.
Aren't employers aware that competent devs are able to learn new things and technical nuances nearly instantaneously given documentation or an internet connection? Obviously, I keep learning and getting better after every interview, though it barely helps, when each interviewer asks an entirely new, arbitrary set of questions or problems....
Honestly, fuck the current state of the system for coding job interviews. I'm just about ready to give up. Why the hell did I put myself through 5 years of NYU for a Computer Engineering degree and nearly $100K in student loan debt, if it doesn't help me land a job?13 -
My code review nightmare part 2
Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.
Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.
The numerous files in question were unit tests files
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>
T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."
I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..
using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>
Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"17 -
I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.
Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.
Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.
He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)
But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done
Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.
How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.
Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.13 -
My code review nightmare?
All of the reviews that consisted of a group of devs+managers in a conference room and a big screen micro-analyzing every line of code.
"Why did you call the variable that? Wouldn't be be more efficient to use XYZ components? You should switch everything to use ServiceBus."
and/or using the 18+ page coding standard document as a weapon.
PHB:"On page 5, paragraph 9, sub-section A-123, the standards dictate to select all the necessary data from the database. Your query is only selecting 5 fields from the 15 field field table. You might need to access more data in the future and this approach reduces the amount of code change."
Me: "Um, if the data requirements change, wouldn't we have change code anyway?"
PHB: "Application requirements are determined by our users, not you. That's why we have standards."
Me: "Um, that's not what I ..."
PHB: "Next file, oh boy, this one is a mess. On page 9, paragraph 2, sub-section Z-987, the standards dictate to only select the absolute minimum amount of the data from the database. Your query is selecting 3 fields, but the application is only using 2."
Me: "Yes, the application not using the field right now, but the user stated they might need the data for additional review."
PHB: "Did they fill out the proper change request form?"
Me: "No, they ...wait...Aren't the standards on page 9 contradictory to the standards on page 5?"
PHB: "NO! You'll never break your cowboy-coding mindset if you continue to violate standards. You see, standards are our promise to customers to ensure quality. You don't want to break our promises...do you?"7 -
So here is my week 72 as a reviewer. But first, let me ask y'all. Am I weird to think that you should finish coding the thing and testing the thing before kicking it out to review? Cuz that's how I do it. And that is the process at my work place.
So anyway, I was doing this review. And it was very wrong. Like really, really wrong. We give a thorough intro to our product (perhaps too thorough) so this guy should have known every test case he had to cover. Or at least, if he was unsure, asked. It was all documented.
Anyway, he kicks out this peer review. First thing I notice, it is not following the standard. Fair enough, we didn't give him the coding standard. BUT HE DIDN'T EVEN MAINTAIN THE FORMAT OF THE ORIGINAL FILE. HE JUST DID HIS OWN THING!!! So I email him the coding standard and make a comment in the review. He denies the finding. No reason. Just turns it down. Strike 1.
Then, I'm going through and he didn't even cover all of the core cases. I found several core cases that he missed. And every edge case. Make a not of it. He fixes only the couple of examples I gave him. Strike 2.
Guy decided to redesign a major chunk of our interfaces. Our interfaces are not just used by us (hence interfaces). We designed them the way they were for a reason. It was not a fun design process. Myself, the architect, one of our customers, and the guy that did the implementation all told him to roll back his change. Especially since it wasn't in the scope of what he was doing. He wouldn't. Strike 3.
I go to the lead and bring him in. He has a talk with him. All of the sudden he is putting out multiple builds per finding. Like most times I will put out like 2 to 4 for the whole peer review. No he kicks out minimum one per finding and chokes the review queue. Strike 4.
Strike 5: he tells me, a former DBA, that I didn't know what I was talking about when I told him to move something into a new table, even after I told him that "while in database terms it doesn't make sense, this is for product robustness".
Strike 6: he was just a condescending asshole. Bragging about how he did this job and that job over his career. His longest position held was about 18 months. Bragged about working at my company and being some hotshot at the company: only worked here for 8 months and that was 5 years ago.
You know. I have never really wanted to fight someone after about undergrad. But he came close.7 -
When u correct someone's coding style, telling them it's not standard and tell them what is the standard way of doing it and they reply with a "why should I do it that way?"6
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update of after i got fired: after the fuck developers company llc was left with no developers, there was a girl there that i didn't mention earlier because as i said: the story is more complex. she came there with good intentions but after she knew the cruel nature of fuck and shit she became notoriously mad, we're still in contact with her so it's nice to hear from her some of the gags that happen there, one of which my really intelligent ex-boss the wordpress DEVELOPER himself told her to finish one of the projects i was working on, and a friend of mine who is infamous of his coding shenanigans left it in my hands before he left as well a couple of months prior (well he was fed up before us, and when i told him to stay with us he said "dude just listen to the motherfucker's voice, i can't do this anymore", my lovely ex-boss has this equally lovely screechy high pitched voice that caused me tinnitus), it's an asp.net project, uses web forms, and a lot of apis, the database is sql server, standard shit but there's no original creation script and i fucked up the only existing database which was in a local computer he used to like calling a SERVER, now to the point: this girl is not a developer, she was however working as a reporter?? kind of like jaspersoft the human or sap crystal woman and she claims that she's pretty good at it, and she's a genuinely good person who was dragged to hell just because she wanted to be close to her daddy (she was working in a different city with more than double the salary she's given now), but she's rich and her dada convinced her to come. she's currently learning java ee on her own so she'd probably leave in the next two months, in her resume she wrote that she know php, well i know php you know php we all know php (the syntax) kind of like mr. shit who passed the sololearn php CERTIFICATE and couldn't stop telling his boss and his boss a.k.a my ex-boss goes "sweet!". going back to the punchline of this rant: she told us that he came to her and asked her to finish the project with php.12
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Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer
Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....
Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while
But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...
The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm
He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.
I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.
Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.
My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"
I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)
He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)
Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.
Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.
I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.
Am really Fed up with it all7 -
My best code review experience?
Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.
One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'
Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."
'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.
Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.3 -
Okay it's FUCKing rant time... FUCK you prestashop!
FUCK your utterly bizarre "coding standard"
Also a big FUCK your config files, since when did config files start to include application logic, multiple includes/requires and modification of super-globals. When did I miss that memo?
This file is full of so much FUCKing horseshit, my FUCKing testicles hurt.
FUCK your "module overrides", yes let's duplicate 20-30MB senseless horror code into another folder, just so we can modify one line, without having future updates breaking our stuff.
And your attempt to migrate to a symphony stucture is FUCKing pathetic, do it properly, or don't do it at all.. FUCKtards..
I know wordpress can be bad, but this...
Prestashop takes FUCKing lousy, headache/cancer- giving, piece of crapware to the next FUCKing level.
I wouldn't even wish this FUCKing upon my worst enemy.2 -
Looking to update the way I write my code to follow:
- Coding Convention
- Standard Work
- Coding Standards
- Whatever other name they call it
And found this...13 -
Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??
It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.
Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.
All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.
Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.
Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.
If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.
Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.
Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!24 -
In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.
Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…
DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."
Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."
If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault." -
I normally just have nightmares about the projects I'm working on, especially when I struggle with a bug for days. Those are usually about just me stressing out about it. However, I have a lot of dreams about computers/technology, not necessarily coding-related:
- datacenters were just potato fields. If you go work the field, you'd go data mining
- in Biology, when being taught how having children works, you only tell that "parenting is only chmod-ing the rights of your children until they become the owners themselves"
- IP addresses with emojis instead of numbers were a standard now and they actually managed to replace IPv4, because everyone was so into emojis. They named it IPvE
- I witnessed a new Big Bang when the 32-bit Unix time overflown in 2038, and we were all quantum bits3 -
While in Mec engineering university program I was in a robocup team (small robots playing soccer against an other team of robots using AI).
I designed the mechanical structure of the robots. After 2 years of development (while all those years our goal was to participate in the upcoming international tournament) we realized the software part of the project was mismanaged and really far behind. I couldn't accept that and learned how to code over night. Couldn't let the project I put so much time in die because of someone else.
With the help of others that came from other backgrounds than software, we made it the to tournament and the following two others after this one.
Now my job involves programming more than standard mec engineering. It also pushed me to do a masters in robotics in which I developed my coding skills even more.3 -
Uuugh... 'come let's build a standard with in the company'
Two ( and I kid you not) weeks later, we don't get it anymore let's build a new standard4 -
I spent the whole day coding in python (usually I code in php or perl) and this language is a fucking joke. C'mon, why everything have to be done in such a weird way? And don't say it's python way because it's bullshit way. Want some examples?
", ". join(str(x) for x in array)
to join array of integers. wtf is that?
True|False
why in hell you need the first letter to be uppercase when your own fucking standard says to use lowercase letters in eg. var names and method names. why?
math.isnan(float(x))
to check if a variable (expected to be integer) is NaN. I won't fucking comment that...
Even prolog don't have such stupid things6 -
I don't advocate low code solutions. But what Microsoft is doing with Power Fx is legit pretty cool.
If anything it would expose people to learn about proper development since the formulas can grow bigger than standard small Excel formulas while simultaneously exposing them to a declarative and functional style of coding. According to what I am seeing, and y'all correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to be made to let pro devs jump in and help with more complex code while at the same time exposing it to non devs in an easy way.
I kinda dig this one2 -
I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.
I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.
My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.
Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.
Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.
The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.
So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.
It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.
After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.18 -
That moment when first coding challenge is a mathematical expression evaluator with custom unary operators but your code does not meet the standard because it did not cure cancer.
The fuck you mean I had no unit tests. You specifically told me that you don't want a lot of code. F@$#&#k -
First Year in College.
I have been into computers since 9th Standard. What I meant was I could make music, edit images, play and install games after downloading, hack them(change values) using Cheat Engine, make trainers for myself because why type when you can freeze, format computers using a pendrive (trust me, I saved a lot of money) and then finally, make some presentations and send emails.
Now, College begins. Programming in C language. I don't know what the fuck that means. But they say, it's 'essential'.
Enter Professor. "Okay students, we begin with the course on C Language. how many of you know pointers?".
Me: Wow. Sounds cool. But, I don't know anything.
I couldn't love coding. I think I love to code but at the end of the day, I'm a sick Undergraduate who fell in love with a Bass Guitar and Vocals and wants to code for a living. Heavily interested in changing the world and all that stuff but have no motivation and even if I have, I can't give a fuck about it.
Peers are getting medals everywhere. I'm sitting alone in a room learning C. They said, It was 'essential', but they never told me, 'why'.
Not a rant. IDGAF what you think but I'm a failure looking for ways to make a living.6 -
At the beginning of a project, everybody has lots of good intentions- call them "new project resolutions." ... Once the project gets underway, though, these good intentions are abandoned, one at a time. When the project is finally delivered,the code looks like a mess, and nobody seems to know how it came to be that way.
-Coding Standard
Pretty legit1 -
Worst part of coding lang I love?
C# being case-sensitive.
Not a C# language thing, but I hate the vilification and anti-coding standard of not 'allowing' prefixes. Interfaces are allowed (ex. IUpdateCustomer), why not classes? Why can't I have a DTO and declare it a TCustomer and the zealots not scream "HE'S USING HUNGARIAN NOTATION!!! TAKE HIM TO THE STAKE!!"?24 -
non english speakers, tell me: how do you feel about the coding standard being english?
i know it is a given at this point, but i do wonder what it'd be like if it wasn't the case32 -
What does projektaquarius do when he doesn't have a working IDE? Reformat code (that I am already refactoring) to an industry standard format and prepare for the arguments that are going to come from the other group who has their own coding standard that isn't industry standard.
Already preparing for the Pascal case versus Camel case argument. Emotionally that is. Mentally the argument basically just amount to "your group didn't want to refactor the code so we did it. Live with it or you do it." -
In my PR :
Senior dev A : "You should change the format according to <link to coding standard>"
Me : "But it doesn't mention anywhere about that format. <senior dev who wrote the standard> also agrees with me. Other reviewers also already approved."
Senior dev A : **proceed to give me an example from a file that's not even in the PR scope**
Me : "I cannot find that file in my PR"
Senior dev A : **give me another example example from my PR**
Me : "Okay I missed that, I am gonna fix it, but other files are already using consistent format. I have already merged changes for 500 files using this format, and I still have 400 files to go.
Do you really want me to revert the changes from 500 files?" :/
Senior dev A : "I don't want to be your enemy, I just want to make our codebase better"
Me : **Mad because he took this personally.**
**I don't want to be your enemy either. I also care about the codebase. I just want to finish this ticket ASAP instead of implementing your cosmetic changes that's not even in the standard so that I can work on another ticket that will have more impact to the company**
Senior dev A : "Ok, I will approve it, just add some whitespaces"
Me : 🤦♀️
I sometimes think that some senior dev just want to flex when they're reviewing PR.
They just want to let people know they wield the power.9 -
Today was a rather funny day in school. School starts for me at 13:40 because our timetable planners are so qualified for this job.
First 2hrs: Physics, fine its good
Second 2hrs: Discrete Maths (however you want to call it)
Goal is to write a text (30 pages, 10, etc all those standard settings). Teacher prefers Latex over word, but we can do it in word if we want. We could choose a topic, I took primes because it looked the best. I decided to use latex because I'm a fetishist and it simply looks better in the end. A classmate was arguing with our teacher about ides: texmaker vs kile. And I'm like "I use vim". So my teacher is like kk
Later that class, when we actually started doing stuff I started the ssh session to my server because I don't know any good c++ compilers for win and I'm too lazy to get a portable version of cygwin (or whatever its called). So in my server I open vim and start coding my tool for Fermat Primes (Fermatsche Primzahlen, too lazy to actually translate). And this teacher seriously is the best teacher I ever met in my life. Usually teachers are like " dude r u hakin' the school server?" and I'm like bruh its just vim and I'm doing it this way because I cannot code on your PC coz I can't install a compiler. And this teacher is like "oh hey you actually use vi, all cool kids used it in 2000. I first though u were kidding and stuff..." And we continued talking about more of stuff like that and I have to say that this is the first teacher that actually understands me. Phew
Now I'm going to continue writing my 30 pages piece of trash latex doc and hope it'll end good1 -
I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.
The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.
None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.
The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.
I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.
First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.
Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?
Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?
Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.
How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?
But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.
But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.
But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.
Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.
Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.4 -
Worst coding procrastination story?
Not necessarily coding, but anything that has to do with writing support reports for an application/feature. Good news is we have a dedicated dept for maintaining reports now, but there was a time developers were required to write and maintain reports (Crystal Reports). Starts out as data in grid, but de-evolves into ..
U: "This value here...can you make that red if its a Thursday before a promotion release on Friday and I forget to update the promotional percent?"
<month later>
U: "Why is this value red?"
<explain why it's red>
U: "That is so stupid, I wouldn't ask for such as feature. I never forget."
<month later>
U: "OMG! I FORGOT TO UPDATE THE PERCENT AND WE LOST OVER $100,000!! THE REPORT WAS SUPPOSED TO FLAG THOSE VALUES IN RED!!! I HAVE THE REQUIREMENT DOCUMENT!! ITS ALL YOUR FAULT!!!"
Not to mention the hours...HOURS worth of meetings filled with "Can you move the value a little to the left, a little more..NO! Too far! Now, make it bold...bolder..uggh...I said bolder, I thought you guys knew a lot about computers."
I eventually ignored the report feature with "I'll work on it later". 'Later' never showed up. Users eventually exported the data to Excel to write their own reports and now exporting data to Excel is a standard feature of our apps.2 -
Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.
There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?1 -
I haven't really had any. That is to say, I haven't worked for a company with a coding standard :/2
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I feel like some developers focus too much on concepts like clean code, software craftsmanship, TDD and so forth, to a point where they almost forget end user needs (ease of use, intuitive experiences, general UX principles).
Don’t get me wrong. I do my best to stick to a decent standard of quality and maintainability. However my solutions are adapted to the specific needs that are being addressed rather than the other way around.
I’ve heard some devs say things to the effect of ”well I know that’s not most intuitive behavior for the user but it’s the cleaner way to do it, so the user will just have to figure it out“. So in essence they’re just coding for their own pleasure rather than addressing user needs4 -
Your tests won't work right because you failed to meet coding standard, not that hard to understand. Yet, here we are still implementing the same shit that got us in this conversation.
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Here, code reviews are not happening 🙁☹️
When the actual error comes to the prod, we dig into the logs and figure out the reason.
The project is not stable and in the development phase, so requirements are coming too much every month with deadlines.
Deadlines are mostly 1 to 2 weeks.
Sr. Devs mostly merge PR without reviewing it.
I had lots of opportunities though due to various requirements like I learnt AWS dynamo DB, S3, and a few things regarding EC2.
But the coding standard which needs to be learned that I think I'm lacking because my code is not getting reviewed.
Not only about coding, we have to create a ticket in Jira for our task which is decided in the scrum and needs to assigned to ourselves.
In the name of scrum, there are 1 to 2 hours of meeting where they started brainstorming about new requirements and how we are going to implement them.
What should I do to make my code more cleaner and professional?1 -
These people belong in a specific kind of hell....
I have to bodge several thousand lines of code where this is the standard....
Can't wait till we begin coding the replacement :D1 -
So is it just a standard thing, now, where interviewers get you to do a coding problem remotely on a shared notepad while they watch you over video chat? For me at least, it is the most uncomfortable style of interview I've experienced. I don't think I'll ever get through one :(4
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do you guys think multitasking is a high standard? at work we deem it essential, but i wonder if it's too much to expect new people to pick up on our pace. if we're not coding in a meeting while answering texts and emails, we're not getting anything done13
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I have workt until 01.00 in the morning on a private project and I have to say Im fairly surprised at the result. Rewriting scripts to make them more wider and powerful is kind of what I like to do (even if I never end up using them for anything but one thing, and its only to procrastinate) but its a hell of a job cause I havent learnt to follow a standard or remembering my already made up one. Im coding 2 correlating scripts for 3 hours without checking how they work cause Im bad getting them into a working state. After I thought I was done and got rid of minor syntex errors, my expetions were super low and I thought it would handikap a funktion. It wasnt even barely working, it was regularly old working. Im feeling cautiously smart. 😎
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I have to write my IoT coursework in an Ubuntu VM running on Linux 3.2. VBox Guest Additions doesn't support this Ubuntu version, neither does anything else. Contiki, the operating system we're coding for has been abandoned for many years, the devs moved to a new project called Contiki NG. If I try to compile with any standard above ANSI C it fails with cryptic errors deep inside the OS. The docs for the old Contiki are paginated with JS so I can't use the browser's fulltext search, but they also don't have proper bulitin search.
This cannot be legal. They are violating every accessibility guideline in existence. I just need the text to be slightly larger and even I have to go through hell. I imagine blind, deaf or dyslexic students just give up.3 -
#Story time.
Been working on a project for 2 months with Colleague "Jim" doing the code reviews. Project is finished in a stable form and can be extended if needed. Then my other colleague/boss "Mo" decided that we need to do a refactor. Fast forward a bit and the conclusion is "Mo" and "Jim" are going to discuss every step with me. And we started a new project that should do the same as the project I just finished
Here some facts:
Every day a meeting/ code review / discussion.
Decisions they make I do not agree with.
I need to redo my work multiple times.
Now this does make me look like a toddler that needs supervision which is not the case.
They want something future proof and something that fits his new coding standard "Mo". and certain things I do agree with and is clearly the better architecture. however somethings are just stupid, time wasting, making it worse. I'm getting so frustrated by the fact that billion dollar companies have clear coding standards that work. and are correct. and this company decided to do their own thing of stupid rules!
- shorten variables
- Keep lines under 90char
- put multiple things in 1 file
- Keep function names short
and many more of removing stuff and let you guess stuff..
I just... *sigh* get so tired of this shit.
*names are randomly chosen2 -
I feel like IE is an example of a deep rooted demon beast that spawns fucktarded bloat transpilers like BABEL.
When companies try to invent their own wheels, or do their own thing is when the pits of developer hell start to spawn such fucking convoluted fucktarded bullshit.
Abstract to Design:
I'm trying to think of a world where things are standardized, as boring as it sounds... Imagine if companies weren't so fucktarded with greedy smoke and mirrors, and they all contributed to making a single product standardized and workable, and improve on that product... Like a physics "Standard model" but for each product invented.
But no... here we are... 20 million ways to accomplish one similar task, with 20 million different designs, with majority adhering to their own flaws... or planned obsolecence... 10 million booby traps of consumer remorse.
Why do we do this as a society just to make some bastard company's profit margin go up, so they can keep competing in the "free market" of fuck all fuckery?
I get it.. yea... innovation... sure..
but sometimes innovation is just a means to and end of sanity, especially when they are proprietary, and especially when that proprietary shit turns to, well... shit!
In a perfect world, things will be designed open-sourced, compatible, and improved upon without "breaking" changes... but this is virtually impossible without standardization of the VERY fundamental components. But then those components can be improved, and might be smaller/lighter/more efficient by design, and simply wont work with the old versions without drastic "TRANSPILATION"
I suppose this is the way it is always going to be... Neverending stream of design "improvements". I suppose being a developer in todays world is a bittersweet existence... unless you're just trying to make ends meet... in that case. I think I might be in hell.
Take a look at web-dev today with all the "improvements" ... it's literally turned into a jungle of FUCK MY LIFE. A giant dick waiving contest with all these dicks colliding against each other in cluster fuck bombardment.
God help us all.... and now back to coding.4 -
PHP features the best of the wicked minds.
In this legacy but still used project just so to save the scourge opening tcp connection (I suppose) some guy wrapped js libs like jQuery, mootools in a script tag.. In individual php files. Then from a main.php include all those libraries. This produces a 2Mb file to send to the client and it's not even compressed. This guy never had any thought about maintenance.
This is one symptom of the problem with PHP that every company developed or have in-house undocumented unmaintained frameworks made by devs without any idea about testing, security and more.
Gosh in a previous work I've seen a PHP cron that used arguments passed to a switch case of 25 cases.
It took 19 years for the language to get a standard, meanwhile leaving the web landscape as a mess of bad coding practices, bad design practices, SQL injections, outdated tutorials and more. PHP is the example that it's not because it's used on almost all the web that it's good, it only means that's it's cheap! Cheap like asking a red neck to build you a car and he tows (deploy) it to your house with his own tow truck he built.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/codin... -
Junior Dev about 18months in my current job and I've got a problem
Started to feel not wanting to code at work, despite working on a greenfield project thats critical and using new tech. I get a little defensive about PR's over stupid small things (PR was once rejected due to auto indentation "not to standard").
Talked with boss (who I get on well with and like) and thinks my problem is I've lost confidence coding. Trys to get more senior Dev to on side to help me out more.
Same senior Dev is really close with other junior on my team - pair on alot of stuff all the time, have lunch and spend free time together, and will work way past working hours just to try and finish something that day (even though it's not due that day).
(Probs working ~60h weeks, where as I'm ~42h and contracted for 37h. I'll work on if I need to but tries to have balance)
Senior and other junior tend to ignore tickets on the board, do the work and then when I pick it up they say "I did that last night". No docs, no PR for me to ask about how it was done (as they merged it themselves). (They have previously completely refactored my branch in the past overnight then not told me atall)
I'm not saying its favouritism here, but I'm not happy with the situation. I feel I can't ask questions as they are always together or they discuss the problem themselves and just give me the answer (not really acknowledging my points). I dont tend to ask for help from this senior Dev now as I don't feel it's worthwhile learning wise for me.
Other people in the team are great but working on other aspects so not a direct one-to-one alignment (others are DB Dev & principal senior dev)
Furthermore I'm wanting to possibly work on full stack web or more architecture stuff, both which are not in my current teams remit (backend up to API).
So - what do I do? Try and remedy the situation in the current team as best as or look for a new teams as cut my losses.
I'm torn between the 2 and I'm unsure how to get out this rut. I feel I need to find a solution to this soon though
(Sorry for the long rant folks)4 -
!rant
I see a lot of people complain about uni degrees and stuff because they don't learn how to code etc. Is this really the standard?
I mean I'm only in fourth semester bachelor and had coding knowledge before starting uni. But we had basic to intermediate java in the first two semester, now learning how to write secure code and OS-Level stuff in C++, we had a module with practical Assembly coding all while still learning all the theory.
At the end of the first semester we had to write a terminal game in Java. I mean of course that's not "real experience" but if you dive in you definitely learn the basics you need to get started in real life.
Or am I wrong completely / just in a weird uni?6 -
If by coding style, you mean conventions and not design patterns, then I'm surprised no one has mentioned the official documentation nor the standard library of sorts. I'm relatively new in the industry but at least I'm quick to realize that every language/framework community tend to have their own preferred style; not a one-size-fits-all thing. And these preferences are usually set off by code samples from the official docs. This is true at least for the big communities where the official docs are well-written.
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Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
Unpopular opinion:
No one should ever argue over ANY coding style unless they're just starting out and thus have to come up with their organization's coding standards for the first time.
Once the standards are set, everyone should just comply with it irrespective of their personal preference. Or alternatively, include back-and-forth code formatting into the development workflow.
The only thing that's important is that by the time code is pushed into the codebase, it is formatted according to the defined standards so that the whole thing looks consistently written, which is basically the point of setting a coding standard.2 -
Just got out of a meeting where they revealed to me that I will be the only dev on this project and I'll need to update the entire thing to a more modern coding standard.
But the project is 10 years old... and is massive... Why do they hate me so much? -
If you want the ridiculous behavior “required” by POSIX, you must set the environment variable ‘POSIXLY_CORRECT’ (which was originally going to be named ‘POSIX_ME_HARDER’).
You just read a line from GNU's official coding standard document :D -
I tried to make some SP using the syntax and formatting that visual studio outputs when making a SSRS report. I thought it was nice.
It formats the code in a standard way and transforms stuff like "join" to "INNER JOIN" and "left join" to "LEFT OUTER JOIN ".
When the team reviewed the code they were like WTF?! This syntax is horrible, it can't be understood. You did this?
*Me with my red face*...
I just said. You know what? I am going to go back to the old school syntax if you prefer. I just thought it was better.
Yeah... You really should go back to old school syntax.
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Keep in mind that the old school syntax is annoying to me... No formatting at all and basic instructions are not in larger upper case.
Anyway, I thought it was nice tbh. I still think it is. And it is definitely better to me in some way.
What bothers me most is that they want to improve their coding. They say they want to be more standard and it seems every time you want to make a change it's not a good idea because "everything is already written that way". And when you don't make a change, "you should have change it"... Well sorry I was just copying the old style.
Anyways , it's not that important. I do get their point. Sometimes.1 -
Had to code review a line of java with this code a while back: ServiceService.isProductProduct. Funny thing is that even though it's obviously stupid, it was in accordance with the coding standard and I couldn't really object to it (._.)
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Just discovered https://twitter.com/ExpertBeginner1. It's the story of my life. Giant classes, copying and pasting, and architects who create frameworks. It's great when we combine all three: A "framework" created by an architect which is made of giant classes that you copy and paste. Imagine a giant generic class where the generic argument is only used by dead code. Pause for a moment and try to visualize that.
It inherits from a base class with lots of virtual methods called by base methods that throw NotImplementedException, so if you don't need them you have to override them to return empty collections. If you're going to do something so messed up you could just put those default implementations in the base. But no, you can inherit, it compiles, and then it throws a runtime error unless you override methods the compiler doesn't require you to override.
The one method you're required to override has a TODO comment telling you what to put there. Except don't ever do what the comment says because that's the old standard. The new standard says never, ever do that.
Most of the time when I read about copy-and-paste coding it's about devs who copy and paste because they don't know how to write or reuse code. They don't mention the environments where copying and pasting the same classes over and over again is the requirement and you're not allowed to write your own code.
Creating base classes where you just override a method or two can potentially work, but only in the right scenarios and only if you do it right. If you're copying and pasting a class that inherits from the base class and consists entirely of repeated code, why the heck isn't that the base class? It could be a total mess, but at least it would be out of sight and each successive developer wouldn't become responsible for it by including it in their own code.
It's a temporary engagement, but I feel almost violated. I know it's a first-world problem, and I get to work indoors and take vacations. I'm grateful for those things.
Before leaving I had to document the entire process of copying and pasting an entire repo, making a ton of baseline edits that should just be in the template but aren't, and then copying and pasting from other places into the copied and pasted code. That makes me a collaborator. I apologize more than once in the documentation, all 20 pages of it that you have to read and follow before you even get to the part where you write the code for what you actually need it to do.
This architect has succeeded in making every single thing anyone does more about servicing the needs of his "framework" than about writing actual code to do what needs doing. Now that the framework is in and around everything it creates the illusion that it's a critical part of our operations. It's not. It's useless overhead.
Because management is deceived into thinking they need it they overlook the fact that it blows up, big and small, every single day. The log is full of failures that I know no one ever sees. A big chunk of what they think it does fails silently, and they don't even notice until months later when they realize how much data they're missing. But if they lose, say, 25% they'll never notice.
When they do notice they just act like it's normal, go into fire drill mode, and fix it. Doom. You're all doomed. I'm standing on the deck of the Titanic next to my jet ski.1 -
So I've been helping with recruitment at work for a lead developer. Our first stage is pretty standard for all levels and it essentially a technical interview because CVs are useless really. We're a C# house so we have questions on framework internals such as how the dictionary class is implemented, locking and thread synchronization techniques. Then some pen and paper coding excercises, like reverse array.
I'm not a big fan of these and I think they are too constrained to detail implementations and not about concepts.
So I ask what stuff do you do at your company to get an idea of some ones competency?1 -
I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:
- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough
despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.
*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market2 -
When there are multiple third party services getting used in your spring boot application. How do you manage their API creds.
Like I use Aws Secret Manager for the keys and different account level info. But after fetching in the application in runtime should we create classes to hold such info or just class variables are enough?
I'm more curious about the coding standard practices of different developers in the globe.10 -
So I go to a GDG for VRView tonight, and generally had a great time. I arrived on time, got set up, crushed the coding exercise, and helped a couple of people out with their code.
As is standard procedure with these kinds of events, there was a giveaway at the end - a sealed Daydream View. The guy running the event picked the winner randomly. I was #6, due to the fact that a guy came in literally 20 minutes before we wrapped. Guess who won the VR set? Yep, the dude who came in late, and sat immediately to my right, making him person #5. I'm pretty sure the words "greifer" and "twatwaffle" ran through my head as I packed up to leave. -_-