"Let's do some pair programming! It will be fun!"

... Fuck no.

Either I start coding and you open a beer, or the other way around. And sure, I do not mind doing each other's code reviews. I respect your feedback.

But I can't look over your shoulder while you misspell keywords. When I write code, I search, try, debug and play at a high speed.

I'm an impressionist/surrealist writing messy passionate functions, breaking lots of things with broad paintbrush strokes before finishing it into detailed perfection. I remember all the places in the code I need to work on, and cover everything with tests.

You're a baroque coder, sometimes even a hyperrealist, with your two-finger 10 wpm typing, writing code strictly line-by-line, decorating every statement with the right checks & typehints in advance. You can not keep two functions in your head at the same time. You write tests reluctantly, but you hate that I barely plan. You plan everything, including your pee breaks.

As a coworker I respect you.

But there is no bigger hell than pair programming with you.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

I might have posted this before. But I am going to post it again. Because emojis.

Me: 😁 Software lead I have finished coding the thing.
SL: 😀 Cool, good job. That is going to really help out the analysts.
Software Manager: 😐 hey I noticed you have coded a new thing and pushed it to integration.
Me: 😁 Yes.
SM: 😐 Well how do you know when it's done?
Me: 😑 . . . When you run it and it does the thing?
SM: 😐 Did you write test steps?
Me: 😕 Yeah . . . they're in the issue ticket.
SM: 😐 Yeah but how do you know those are right?
Me: 😕 Because I wrote the thing and the test steps?
SM: 😐 did you put any steps in our acceptance test procedure?
Me: 😕 No.
SM: 😐 why not?
Me: 😧 Because the acceptance test procedure tests requirements. There is no requirement for this functionality.
SM: 😑 Then why did you do it?
Me: 🤔 Because it was an internal request from the analysis team. There is no customer impact here.
SM: 😑 I really think we should write a requirement.
SL: 🤔 But what requirement is he going to attach this to?
SM: 😑 We don't have to attach it to a requirement. We can just test it once and remove it.
Me: 😒 SM, you know we never remove anything from the acceptance test procedure.
SM: 🙂 We do sometimes.
SL: 🤔 When was that I have worked here for twenty years and we have never removed a test from that document.
SM: 😑
SL: 😒
SM: 😑
SL: 😒
Me: 🤐
SM: 😧 I really think there should be an acceptance test written.
SL: 😧 Looks like you're writing an acceptance test.
Me: 😒 Alright as long as y'all're payin'. Shit I was just tryin' to save y'all money.

*acceptance test written and sent to peer review*

Peer: 😐 The requirement tested section doesn't have any requirements spelled out.
Me: 😅 No.
Peer: 🤔 Why?
Me: 😓 Because there is no requirement associated with this test.
Peer: 🤔 Then why are we adding an acceptance test?
Me: 😡 WELL AIN'T THAT A GOOD GOD DAMN QUESTION!?

I spent about 5 hours today coding and I was totally in the zone. I'm talking things were working properly, tests were passing, bugs were being squashed all over the place. It was completely amazing, I felt like a god ruling over my code kingdom.

After about 5 straight hours I realized that I needed food so I got up, stretched my legs and had some dinner. Well I sat back down about an hour ago and I am SO far out of the zone. Everything is breaking, I can't focus and I have no idea why. My kingdom was overrun with a plague of bugs in just the short time I paused to eat.

Moral of the story: when you get in the zone don't stop for anything even if it seems like basic human necessity. After all we aren't human when we're in the zone, we are coding gods.

My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.

In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.

We have this guy who is responsible for software testing, user support and stuff. Not a programmer but with good technical base knowledge. He was interested in writing automated tests, and I told him he might take some time to learn and help us there. In the last months I had to answer and explain a gazillion questions about our codebase and coding in general and it took me lot of time. But last week he showed me his first test suite which was actually good code and showed a lot of understanding of all aspects of this. This was more satisfying than anything on work ever.

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

Why in the name of Donald Knuth did you think it was a good idea to have a 1500 line Java Method? What THE HELL WERE YOU SMOKING THE ENTIRE FILE IS OVER 3000 LINES AND HALF OF THEM ARE COMMENTED OUT!

Don't even get me started on your "unit tests" which is a massive 5000 line behemoth that randomly has massive swaths of code commented out.

And of course no solution like this would be complete with you HARD CODING EVERY F****INIG STRING IN EVERY TIME!

And it's not like you don't know how to use classes as you have several of them, every single one of which is over 500+ lines and consists of only getters and setters. LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO A MAP! REALLY WHY WOULD YOU USE 500 LINES FOR A CLASS THAT IS JUST GETTERS AND SETTERS?!

The part that really burns me about all of this though, isn't the fact that you sent it to me when I was running into a similar issue, and said "check this out it should help", what bothers me most isn't the indescribable rage I felt looking at your code, the part that really really really bothers me is that you are a veteran with over 15 years in Java development, and according to the org chart are a lead senior engineer getting paid substantially more than me, whereas I am considered a lowly mid-level developer, who isn't worth promoting to your level.

On the plus side you are now going to be featured on theDailyWTF so congrats on the notoriety.

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've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.

But they still need:

1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.

2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.

3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.

4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.

I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

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!"

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.

If you make students take coding tests/quizzes on paper, don't grade them on picky syntax errors! We don't code on paper in the real world; syntactic highlighting and red squiggles will usually show you that you accidentally typed that declaration incorrectly. Understanding programming concepts is much more important than being able to write a program on paper.

I did a job interview recently for a company and the test was something like this.

In ruby, write a web server that will serve a specific line number from a text file.

I thought up a simple solution and a more advanced solution, but I opted to go with the simple solution and submit my work quickly. I made a nice web server with tests and everything and it used the sed command to get the line number from the file.

Now, they had various instructions, like it had to perform. They asked how it'd perform with 10G, 100G files. I thought "Eh... it'll be alright."

The solution they were looking for was the "advanced" solution that I thought up, which involved storing a binary file of 32/64 bit integers that reference the byte-offset of the line they're looking for. Basically a binary index file.

This violates all of my sensibilities, because I would never build a database indexer like this using ruby, of all things.

I thought it was a stupid test, and how do these companies honestly expect me to spend hours coding and then tell me I didn't go far enough? It's unethical.

I actually followed-up with the "advanced" solution a couple hours after hearing I was out, just to show them that their process is flawed.

This is how I feel while coding a system whitout tdd or any kind of tests, and it's the company's major system... Anyone else?

I've been fired today and somehow it was an relief :)
As I know that I am pretty much the only one who knows how the infrastructure works and I am the only one who actively tried to get the company to a better level of coding (tests, code reviews, proper deployment / continuous integration,...) It somehow feels like that gif.

I never had problems with punctuation marks during coding, especially the notorious semicolons because I've always used an IDE, ain't gotta time to waste on compiler errors.

But today I meet my nemesis, a fucking comma wasted an hour of my precious time, causing my unit tests to fail in Python, my unit tests where expecting a list and the actual value is a tuple, it turned out that there was this trailing comma - which I don't know where the hell it came from - at the end of a function call that returns a list.

I only noticed this freaking comma after Pycharm indicated a conflict between the returned type and the expected type and underlined the culprit, that small invisible fucker 😬.

Thank you Pycharm and type hints in Python 3.

this is why, my fellow devs, you have to use an IDE.

PS: For those of you who aren't familiar with python, a trailing comma at end of a variable turns it into a one element tuple.

1, = (1,)

This guy I know applied for a senior position at a company I used to do freelance for. He walked in while I was spending the day there to work on our project.

We used to work in the same company and I knew that this guy doesn't know shit. He's the type that would foam in the mouth while bullshitting his way through any sort of discussion.

Anyway, they had him set up on a computer a few tables from me to complete some coding exercises--real simple stuff just to see how he would approach some common problems.

There was no time limit set but the tests shouldn't have taken him more than an hour.

He sat there for SIX HOURS.

At this point, I went out for a smoke, came back 5 minutes later, and found that he wasn't there anymore.

Apparently, he just stood up and said, "Nope, can't do it" and then left the building without a word to anybody else.

We never heard of him again.

Oh, and the tests? Not a single line of code written XD

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

!rant
I'm an idiot. I freely admit this. I spent a solid 3 hours on a new endpoint in a WCF service, only to have it looked upon and told to fix it. I knew that the service I was calling didn't work like that. I did, I knew it. I didn't think about it while coding the endpoint, but I knew it. At least the changes only needed to happen in one file, and only took about 25 minutes with tests and all. But damn it, I knew better. I looked at my buddy, straight in the eye, and told him "Told you I was an idiot." He laughed, I laughed, the table laughed, we killed the table. It was a great time!

Boss coding.
Boss not fan of tests at all.

"Hey I'm doing all of tests" - boss to me.
"Cool, are they automated? Or do you want me to implement'em?" - me to him

[long speech about why tests are irrelevant including "...once I tested, it is tested, we dont need to have automated tests."] *im teaching you because you dont know voice*

Please, help meeee

Recruiter is contacting me out of the blue for a vague job position. Tells me he is very interested in my skillsets as they are apparently difficult to find.

I don't hate my current job but it has some problems. My interest is piqued.

I ask for more details and tell him what minimum benefits I would expect, given I won't quit my job for less. I tell him I have a very tight schedule at work and at home right now but I could fit in some time for a 1-2h interview.

He tells me I'll get more details in the next interview and tells me there will be a little coding test. Ok sure...

Dude proceeds to send me a test description by email. It consists in designing an actual small python project. Would take at least 1 full day of work (tests, doc and functionality included). I have 3 days to complete it.

fuckThat.jpg

Is this guy for real? In this market?

Fuck you for testing devs with them online algo tests instead of giving them real projects to do as a way to assess their coding skills

When you're writing unit tests in xcode and it crashes and loses its syntax colouring and autocomplete. All of a sudden you're coding on textedit instead.

"Coding se darr nahi lagta Sahab, Unit Tests likhne se lagta"

"Coding doesn't scare me Sir, writing Unit Tests does"

As a fresher, UTs scare me.

Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

I am pretty decent developer but ended up in Quality assurance :/ it hurts me when people are having awesome discussions about coding amd I am performing dumb tests.

Worked as a student in a big company. Just doing data entry and checking product data. It was a nice part time job at the same time with computer science study. After a year I asked for something else and switched to the Android Team. I said I could do a little bit of Java and wrote for another half year Unit Tests. That was the point where I really learned coding and got experienced. Would never learned so much in my study because I was lazy. Now I can call me a Android Developer. Still love the company for giving me this opportunity.

I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.

I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.

I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]

I got the job.

I've had a couple of interviews that were bad because I fluffed them, but the worst was a 4 stage process I went through a while back.

Development hub for an international org, 1st stage was a phone call with high level questions. Stage 2 were online coding tests, which I passed. Third - another phone call. Finally, a visit to the office. I was informed that I was the only one to get this far after the other filtering. This is where it all went wrong.

I'd been led to believe this would be a reasonably informal chat (around an hour or so) to fill in some of the detail of what I'd already been given. It wasn't. It turned into 2+ hours of the most intense grilling I've ever had. Felt like I'd gone 12 rounds by the end. Another coding test in the middle of it. The interviewer seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to show that he knew much more than me and seemed to be trying to catch me out, rather than really discover what I knew.

By the end of it, I didn't want the job and I didn't want to report directly to someone who seemed to thrive on making life difficult to boost his own ego.

After some hardcore coding days I notice: Wait a minute.. I had no coffee. How was that fucking possible? I mean the tests ran green. The client was happy and..

.. and then I woke up.

/*
"Not wk135, but blah blah blah"
Please don't misuse wk135 (Sorry)
It's about coding tests
Thank you. */

=>
A company took their technical test on this really weird website. There was a Windows Narrator guy's voice giving instructions while a timer was running. I had to flash my ID to the webcam and then fit my head on an outline on the screen. It was for a web dev position. I had to speak into the microphone to answer the Narrator's questions and then send the video to them. The questions were weird and hypothetical, mostly. I just thought that their process was dumb and unnecessary.

=>
I don't like aptitude and algebraic tests. One company, I remember, had their test on Google Forms. For some multiple choice questions, they put check boxes instead of radio buttons. So, I could just blaze through it selecting all options. Some of the questions had their first option as "All of the above" 🤔. Fortunately, I didn't pass the test.

=>
The company I'm interning with, starting from next month, had a good interview process. They asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS, and a few on algorithms and data structures. I was also given a task where I had to make a css animation of trees. I'm glad they didn't have an algebra entry test.
😊

Wanted to move to London out of curiosity/adventure. Started doing interviews online and all companies wanted a stage 2/3 in person but that would've been a pretty expensive flight just to go on a short interview, especially with my budget back then.

The guys at my current company were pretty cool and instead we did more video calls and coding tests, then they offered me the job without having to do the face to face.

Had a week to pack up and move here. Never had been in the UK before that. I arrived in the evening, slept at my temporary accommodation and went to work next morning. That's basically how I got here :)

I wanna be a millionaire, so fuckin bad.

So, throughout this week there have been massive trials and tribulations regarding my lack of coding practice however through many nights and days coding I have almost completed the task I was set last week.

I didn't realise how out of practice I was so this posed as a big challenge for me. However I pulled through and tomorrow it will be ready to send for the interview!

I also have another test to do in vanilla php - Typical blog which would be such a doddle now I'm back in the zone. I just have to remember I'm not using Laravel!

The sense of accomplishment is real and I'm so relieved I've come this far. Maybe I will have this career of my dreams which I rightfully deserve.

Below is Stripe, doing random tests :)

Listened for about a half-hour yesterday to DevA ‘beat down’ DevB writing a console app for trying out a proof-of-concept idea he had.

DevB: “What’s the URL of the development server?”
DevA: “Why? What are you doing?”
DevB: “I’m needing to throw some messages to it so I can capture data for something I’m working on.”
DevA: “How are you calling the service?”
DevB: “I wrote a console app”
- you could almost hear the eye roll -
DevA: “A console app? Why in the world would you write a console app?”
DevB: “Oh..um..no reason. I just need log some test data for something I’m playing around with. How should I do it?”
DevA: “If it’s test data, you should have wrote a unit test. You see, unit tests …”
- yammer on and on for about 5 minutes about the virtues of unit tests…never really explaining anything -
DevB: “Yea, I’m not needing to test the result or anything. I just need to log some data.”
DevA: “Then you should use a unit test for that, not a console app. With a unit test, you’ll be able to validate the data. That’s what unit tests are for. Microsoft should have never put in console apps in Visual Studio. It just leads to bad coding practices.”
DevB: “Um…I don’t care. It’s a console app because I just need data…thanks anyway”

Today, DevC was talking to DevA

DevC: “Charlie is testing the order module, but there isn’t any test data. Do you still have the data generating script?”
DevA: “Oh yea, I’ll send him my console app that populates the database.”

It was all I could do from screaming “You stupid –bleep-er!! What the f–bleep-ck was all that yesterday?!”, but none of my business. Better to devrant about it than start a fight.

It all starts with a small regex script to automate my coding session. Now I start to automate every shit I used to hate (without notice it).

Where was Python all my life. Where was it when I have to configure my server, run integration tests or benchmark all by myself. The past was really scary 😂

Spent about six hours writing tests and coding a user log in system for a Rails app last night. Finally finished at around 2:00am. Commited, pushed and merged, then called it a night.

Woke up today and Postgres is refusing to play nice. Spent twenty mins or so fixing that and then ran rspec.... Two thirds of my tests are missing - everything I wrote last night. I check my code and sure enough, they aren't there.

Wild panic ensues for a solid 5 mins before I realise I didn't actually pull the updated master branch after deleting my feature branch last night.

Now I feel like an idiot, but a relieved one.

Making calls, meetings, and "brainstorming" half-baked features or designs or any other slop bullshit for 12 hours a day?

Wow, you are an impressive "startup bro"!!!

Coding, testing, running emulators, tests, reading technical documentation, ensuring product success in the real world, and implementing efficient full stack software for 12 hours a day?

Fuck you!!!

These are the expectations of management. Just remember, what they do is "extremely difficult", but you are simply just a resource queue that takes input and converts it to real-world implementation.

Give me a fucking break

Two brainfarts that resulted in... a lot of pain

I had been coding all day, ~6hrs. I was in the zone, so I hadn't saved to git. It was all uncommitted changes (you see where this is going...)

Brainfart#1: The code used the "Contact" class, but for some reason my hands typed "Product" in this ONE line.

Brainfart#2: I became aware of Brainfart#1, so I changed the variable from "Product" to "Contact". However, I instinctively pressed F2, "Rename Symbol", instead of just changing the variable I was using. Now ALL of the references to "Product" were to the "Contact" class instead, across all of our code.

I finished coding. I committed and pushed the changes, closed the IDE, and left the desk for a snack. When I came back, the automated tests were failing due to an import error. That's when I noticed my mistake. I couldn't do Ctrl+Z because I had closed the editor. I had to change the names one by one across all of our code. "Contact" and "Product" are probably our two most used classes 😭

A course at university made us program a chat server and client with Java RPC (in the days where there was no such thing as stack overflow), without ever teaching us anything about coding.

The grading was based on unit tests executed on a Server the university provided.
The server was down or overloaded most of the time and one could only try to deploy at most 3 times...
There were heuristics in place to find duplicate solutions.

... I have to say, that course took me from "hello world" to developer within a couple of months. Thanks assholes!! :D

Testers in my team have been told like 1000 times to follow the style guides that we all follow. That's not that big a deal. The big deal is that they were put on this project without having any mathematics background when the project is all about geometric stuff. So after me as a developer having to put so many hours to explain to them why the tests are not covering the requirements or why the tests are red because they are initializing the data completely wrong, I ask them pretty please to do the checks for the coding style and I have already been 4 hours reviewing code because not only I have to go through the maths and really obscure testing code to ensure that the tests are correct, but every line I have to write at least 4 or 5 style corrections. And some are not even about the code being clean, but about using wrong namespaces or not sticking to the internal data types. For fuck shake, this is embedded software and has to obey to certain security standards...

I just wrote unit tests for like the first time in my life (didn't find it useful in university, someone else handing in the project always did that). It cut my coding time by a factor of 3! You should try this one if haven't already, it really saved me a lot of headache right now.

Coding tests. I hate them. On any timed test, I completely lock up and forget everything I know. I'm amazed I've gone 26 years in my career without being fired for not taking tests well. Because, as we all know, that's the core task of every single job. Taking timed tests and shit.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Fuck...
I'm not getting that job then.

So I just had one of those interview coding tests on hacker rank and screwed it up big time.

I'm a C# guy and it was a Java position. I worked with Java, like 10 years ago, and they're pretty similar so I brushed up over the last week when I had free time.

Absolutely blew it. It's not like it was hard, I just got into one question (of 6) and it ate up all of my time. The task was simple, make a JSON call, read the data, check if you need more calls, pull out a data field from all the concatenated results and return it in a sorted list. ONE HOUR it took me. A combination of not knowing the API well enough, simple syntax errors and relatively slow compilation.

Godammit.

The next question was implement an Object hierarchy but since I'd run out of time, all I got was the class declarations before the timer ran out.

fuck, fuck, fuck.

I guess the test did it's job and weeded out someone who can't contribute to the team...

I did one of those shitty logic bullshit tests these a few weeks ago. It was fucking dumb. Was told to write an algorithm to test when an egg would break if it was dropped off a ladder with 100 steps. An egg would break if you dropped it without being on a ladder. Am I right? The guy was like yeah but what if it didn't? I said Well it would. Eggs are fragile. How about you go away with your fictional fucking logic and ask me some proper question that test my actual coding knowledge instead of trying to pony about on your high horse. Cunt!

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

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Had a coding challenge for an interview. 2 questions and I passed all the tests on both questions. But I got an email from the recruiter saying that one of my questions didn’t have a working solution??? Wtf it passed all the tests, am I retarded?

If coding is fun then your job (Backend Developer) should be fun right?

No.
You have to setup projects which isn't fun.
You have to setup tools which isn't fun.
You have to write unit tests which isn't fun.
You have to learn to use some frameworks which may not be fun.

alert("Really bad english here");

I need to study.
I want to study.
But I can't.

I am 16 year old and I am in school. When I'm not studying for tests, I am programming something. I'm not finding time to do anything else. Just getting stressed.

Anyone in here started coding early too?
How do you separate time for school and for coding?

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

git stash pop'd on wrong branch, hadn't realized it until after a bunch more work. Then continued screwing things up and unit tests are failing.

This is not a good coding day.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

I have found that once you work for a company where you have to implement everything in its raw form using the raw language and raw logic, you really have to know what you're doing and knowing some basic/medium programming and having some algebra knowledge doesn't cut it (unlike some people think).

I've been at two sides of the coin: I worked for a company that had everything in place, a framework that handled all edge cases and what not and I just had to focus on user stories, but I also worked for a company where I had to do everything manually.

For example, at the latter company I had to know Discrete Mathematics; truth tables to their most convoluted and disgusting form, having to be able to apply this on a late Friday night with a headache and lack of food and sleep with the PM stressing out.
I've had to deal with NOT AND OR AND OR AND OR AND branches or whatever, where an OR behaves like an AND and if you want a value between an AND AND and an OR, you'd have to do a NOT OR.. to think about latches, all in my head, sigh, anyway, within limited time constraints, without even having time to write tests, having to make sure that everything checks out while the client is breathing down my neck. Yeah, not such fun times.

I'm happy for those of you who can just write some moderately difficult logic but you don't have to break your head over doing everything manually, as if you're in the coding stone age and nothing is taken care of.
Companies like these make me want to run away.

I'm still looking for a job after more than two months. Never thought I'd say this but after all these interviews I'm starting to prefer live coding tests over take home assignments. You spend a few hours preparing by reading interview guides (the interviewers usually get their questions from these same guides) and then you either do well or fuck up but it's all over in a few hours and you move on with your life.

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

I am tired of a glorified code monkeys cosplaying software engineers.

Disclaimer: in general, I have immense respect to engineers and technological advances that came from FAANG/MANGA. Bbbuuuuttttt...

Especially people that has a few relatively short (less than a year) stints in a few of them and thinking that their salary expectation for their skills is reasonable.

What I've saw so far, based on a few hires for past few years in a company of ~50 engineers, Python/JavaScript stack, monolith to microservice transition (all people had senior and above titles):

* Have no idea how to setup own development environment on MacBook.
* Have no idea how to run code and tests for Python (from discussion, the two only development experience was "code - commit - push - done" and "clicking button in remote coding environment".
* Have no idea how to use bash/zsh (the person had "Linux skill up to 11").
* Grinding leetcode and interviewing during work hours (were let go immediately).
* Introducing a new microservice for each task (we're transitioning from Django monolith, but not to that extent).
* Ignoring all the onboarding, documentation and ignoring every request for writing documentation "I am not a technical writer".
* Knowing nothing about Kubernetes (this was in the job posting/requirements).
* Person actively hostile to any frontend task (the position is not full stack, but JavaScript is a required skill).

I am pretty open and I understand the eternal "generalist vs specialist" thing, but if the person do not posses certain skills and actively lie about it, just because "I worked at FAANG companies, obviously I have that skills" - it's dishonesty at best and fraud at worst. And if with the end of ZIRP you suddenly became unhireable in FAANG/MANGA - you need to think why.

There are tons of small software companies that nevertheless have a good salary and benefits, and most of the time hiring was a breath, because for the most of the people they were flying under the radar.

Unfortunately, since this year the hiring is exhausting, the amount of incapable candidates is incredible (a lot of them with credentials), and instead of 10-15 candidates per position (before and during pandemic), now there are more than 300 candidates per position with "impressive" working experience and only 10 people who really spend time on interviewing.

In short, if you think you're worth gold only from 3-4 companies in the world and all of them stopped hiring you - you should rethink your worth.

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.

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

Selenium has been the most magical thing in my coding life so far. Its so exciting to see a browser operating I itself automatically. I actually realized why some sites ask you to perform some tests to confirm whether you're a robot or not . For those who don't know, selenium and a few others are the robots in question. 😂

There was MCQ test based on Java we were required to give by our degree college, partnered with this firm.
The image is not even the tip of the iceberg.
3 of the four options in every question were same.
Select A and later come back to the question, you'll find option C as selected.
Never was I ever this frustrated, not even all the times I've encountered a NPE.
Shitty shitty shitty as fuck.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

I think their should be like tests or any kind of competition on coding kind of thing in devrant.

Or tips related to coding no matter any language most common mistakes etc.That's my idea tho😅😅😅
What u guys say about this??

How do you switch from testing while debugging (functional) to TDD unit tests?

Usually I test while coding by just running the use case and making sure while coding, bad inputs are caught/handled.

But most times I start with a general idea of the structure and what the about should be (which essentially would be the functional test case?)

I don't think about how you can break each part or the functions I need until I need them. Then usually start simple and then refactor. And until I'm sure each time I refactor would require changing the tests?

!rant && seekGuidance
Been coding for 8 years now, working for at least 6-7 ( freelancing mostly ). Have done multiple big projects along the way, and have not written a single test case ever. Everything works just fine, I usually test things alongside coding stuff. Could someone explain the benefits of creating tests? You can slap me in the face for not doing it if you want ( after explaining why it's so bad ). btw, i'm a web developer ( symfony / angular / vue )

I hate coding tests for a job interview. I've done three types:
1) university style of "write function that does x" (fizz buzz)
2) this code has a bug, fix it
3) write a program that does this university style contrived thing (exact change)

One and two usually are timed to 10 to 15 minutes per question. Three is untimed but unstated "time counts".

Off all three, the last one is the best in my opinion. However it still seem like we could come up with something better.

if I have to perform coding tests on CodeSignal, should be good enough to practice some hours on leetcode or hacker rank? I don't want to blow up this one, I need to job

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

Start coding a project for version 7.x, everything works in tests. Deploy it on the server and it doesn't work. Checks version and turns out it is 6.x, ask my manager why didn't he tell me before, he goes like so what, do it for all versions.

I go wtf

So I work in a so called agile team of 5 people, where on of the members has the role of tester. Now this person doesn't have much technical experience, if any, in regards to coding, so the purpose of the tester is primarily to fo automated UI tests and system testing. Am I in the wrong for questioning the importance and relevance of this role, or is it just because in my previous work experience, the developers had the responsibility for testing whatever was made, and I just have to get used to this new way of working?

What do you guys think of forced linters (checkStyle) on java assignments?

At this University we have a submission system that checks for your code where if a line didn't match the coding specification then it's an instant zero.

Being experienced in programming before going to a university, this somewhat surprised me, it also has unit tests implemented in it where it checks against input and output.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is it too much for people who unlike me never seen code before? Or let them have hell and understand how to deal with it? I personally think it's too much for beginners.

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

So there was this project in second year of uni, I was in a team with 2 friends, we had to do a small project to learn programming. I was the most experimented one but still very bad.
One night, I took a few beers and started coding.
I wrote almost all the thing that night, the main functionalities plus the input/output.
But as I was drunk I made some weird decisions:
-naming all the classes in french and all the variables in English
-no tests (who does tests?)
-comments in Spanish

The next morning, when I send the code to my friends (we didn't know about git yet), they started hallucinating. We spent a lot of time refactoring and cleaning.
In the end, as most of the logic was there, we ended up the project a few days before due date and celebrated with more beers 🍺

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

Funny how things comes around...
So... project start-up... everybody learning and designing the future new system. Then we get to a point that we saw that we'll probably need someone outside or dev team to setup all the environments CI/CD pipelines... Our PM said "what about we get a Devops guys to take care of that?" Most of our team members agreed but our Techlead said "Devops is not a job, it's a culture.". Ok, nice... I understand that point, but for a system of the size of the one that we're building...It would probably be a good idea to have someone to take care of that for us. BUT, he (the techlead) said that he will be taking care of all that himself (along with coding part of the backend).

RESULT: We're stuck in the point that we're unable to test our system in the correct environment, we've no pipeline for automated deploy of our sprints...

Guys, I think the Devops is no more then somebody that is going to take care of some tasks in the project, like the backend, the frontend, the tests, the management...

Ok so I'm working at this bank that hired me as a lead dev to do something about the quality of the software. Now we have CI builds with front end and back end unit tests, sonarqube, coding standards and much more. First release.of our software had only 1 low impact defect! All other software they released in the past always has dozens of bugs.

Now I have this front end guy in my team. He thinks he is really good and actually said my front end skills suck. What?? Wtf you saying? I'm truly full stack and doing front end way longer than he does and already did many many successful projects for awesome well known companies. So he refactores some JS component I wrote. Now this component is very simple but needed to look and behave different on different devices and screen sizes. It was working perfectly. Our tester did extensive tests on all sorts of devices and browsers: worked perfectly.

So, this 'front end king' is now already in the 3rd week of making changes to this component. And still it is not working properly. And he doubts my front end skills?!

Hahahaha go fuck yourself you god damn piece of fucking front end retard!! Everything you make doesn't worl right away and needs at least 4 revisions. Fuck you!

Me, taking a coding class in uni:
Purposely cramping everything in as few lines as possible, making the code barely readable, just to screw with the guy who had to correct this mess.
In my defence, the assignment they gave us was garbage. The task descriptions were often ambiguous or even contradictory to what actually was the case ("The InputStream will contain a string of csv data, each element starts in the next line" -> was a malformed single line string) and the automated tests they wrote to check our output where either completely unhelpful because of their meaningless error messages, or sometimes even plain wrong, telling us our output was wrong, even though it definitely wasn't.

Code with no clear architecture, no documentation, no coding standards, no tests, many security-issues, a lot of hardcoded stuff, written by people forced to use a completely new technology stack and messing up, of course.

But we are not allowed to change anything, of course.

We have to keep coding in that style and with the tools present in the project. For uniformity, of course.

I managed to work on that code for 2 years... Recently it dawned on me that I don't give a crap anymore.
I quit, of course.

So today was my first time combining mocking, depenancy injection and promises. I thought I had a relatively good understanding of everything until I started writing tests - now my head is spinning.

The actual coding has gone really well - implimented the strategy pattern so I can reuse my code whenever I want to make an API call - and everything is nicely decoupled so it should be easy to test. In theory.

If anyone here happens to write tests for a living, I have a new found respect for you today...

Time for a beer 😅

And here it comes bois, the famous Monday Morning Mumbling is back, for everyone's pleasure.

Do you remember your uni years, when you had wonderful coding lessons, and you learned sick languages ?

I do aswell, since I'm still in uni.

But why, WHY, IN ALL OF GOD THOUGHTS, DO I STILL HAVE TO TAKE MATHS LESSONS ?

It's my fourth fucking uni year, and I'm still supposed to deal with math lessons which are about what I learned 6 years ago. And guess what ? I still failed the test since I fucking don't understand a single shit in maths.

"Uuuuh if yu wan tu derivate a function u hav to multiply ur derivated function basic expression with the derivate itself lul xDDD so funi"

FUCK OFF DUDES I DON'T GIVE A SINGLE SICK BIRD SHIT ABOUT MATHS. I WASTED THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE LEARNING ABOUT BINARY TREES, MATHEMATICALS WAYS OF SPILLING YOUR CEREAL BOWL WHEN YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IN FIVE MINUTES, NUMERIC WAY OF OPTIMIZE YOUR SINK SPACE WHEN YOU'RE TOO LAZY TO DO THE DISHES, JUST LET ME FUCKING WRITE CODE INSTEAD OF ANNOYING ME WITH UNEXPLAINABLE MATHS SHIT NOW !

I know maths are important, okay ? But I'm so fucking tired of learning this shit again and again and still failing those shitty tests where they only give you maths problems without any other goal than messing with your grades.

Fuck this shit I'm pissed off on so many levels, I wasted tons of money on a private school to enhance my résumé history, and now I'm stuck with some strange "f'(x)" boi that will ruin my year.

RT's appreciated, if you recognised yourself in this story, don't forget to send some biscuits to my postal address.

TL;DR : Why wasting your time on theoritical lessons when you could use your time to learn new dynamic technos, like C++98 ?

I know unit tests and TDD get a bad wrap but I think they’re both great. The problem is people don’t think about what they’re actually coding.

Today I uncovered a unit test with 100 asserts in it.
And half of them are in a loop.

😳

If unit tests weren’t a thing then the dev who wrote this would still be a shit dev.

I remembered about my HackerEarth test for a company I had applied to. Quickly took the test and literally submitted it at the last minute. Phew, that was close😅....

Applied for 4 jobs. If successful in each interview a total of 16 interviews, 6 coding tests as two of the jobs have 2 coding tests. One of those coding tests was to build a frontend and backend from scratch fully united tested implementing part of the product they are building. When I am recruiting I find out everything I need to know in about 2 hours. Does this seem all a bit too much or is it just me ?

I was having a weird time playing manager because we had none. And the new one kind of sucks and it is too junior for the role. Acting as TL too and had almost no time to code or do PRs. And. Gee. Yesterday I went back to coding after a few months. And I found out that We have a team member that just shits all over the code. Tests that are invalid, basically testing nothing. Methods done apparently for no reason. It took me a good deal of time to sort things thru. And now I'm at a point where I can finally do some reviews. Long day today.

I never finished it, but before I was working in the industry, I was coding through a book called Build Your Own AngularJS. My intent was to have piecemeal instruction/example in TDD and code way above the level of complexity I was used to. You essentially build the core of AngularJS in about 900 unit tests with total coverage. 1000pages long, its no walk in the park.

I gave it up when my time was short, and focused on higher level concepts: building apps, learning tools of the trade.

Now that I am getting plenty of exposure to that level, I am thinking my free learning hours may be better spent going down into the complex worlds shown in this book. A couple of things I found there really stayed with me and shaped how I think about problems. It was also very illuminating to see how complex algorithms work “in the wild”. I cant stand learning algorithms in isolation, generally speaking.

Has anyone seen this book? I know the framework itself is older now, but I don’t think that is much relevant for this learning use case.

I only know of one student who completed this. Took him a few months. He is an absolute machine.

I'm curious about where have you learned coding? I had learned Java most of my life, in a university course since the age of 15. It was a special programming course for high school students and out of 6000 students who applied I was one of the lucky 50 that got in after 3 huge tests in logical thinking and math. This was the path I took to have this job now as a full time software engineer. I'm interested to know how all of you guys learned programming and when have you started. Feel free to tell about apps or programs you use as I'd like to further increase my knowledge in other languages too ☺

What music do you like to listen while writing tests, implementing feature, bugfixing, refactoring, coding, scripting?

What has helped you pass interview coding tests?

Creating a new class to help implement a new feature. Start with my tests (going full TDD).

Feature gets more urgency given to it, write slightly less tests as deadline approaches (half TDD).

Out of time, any future tests are burnt (no TDD) as I frantically wrap up the class with not even the time to write down a plan, it's live coding at this point.