One of the scariest pumpkins I've ever seen...😂😨

Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

Team Lead: Anyone has any concern on their tasks? I'll see what I can do to help.
Me: Yeah I'm afraid I would not be able to finish my task on time because of its complexity.
Team Lead: Try harder.

What's the point of asking?

Password complexity checker for big car rental company is set to insane mode
☑️ 30 char
☑️ symbols
☑️ numbers
☑️ upper & lower
❎ still 'too weak'

Truth..

Anyone looking for something interesting to do???

Step 1) understand how basic circuitry works on a bread board nothing too fancy. ( Implement NAND, AND, ADDER, SUBTRACTOR)

Step 2) learn about microprocessors and how OS works

Step 3) learn assembly

Step 4)write a basic assembler and understand how loaders and linkers works !

Step 5) write a kernel with very basic features like memory management and process management and some drivers for IO

Step 5) write an emulator for some simple systems .! ex chip-8.

Step 6) read about compiler theory and automata

Step 7) write a basic Python interpreter that compiles (not interpreter) to native assembly.

Step 8) implement TCP stack .

Step 9) learn as much as u can about complexity measurement ), data structures and algorithms using C or C++ it's very important ( familiarity with pointers and thus computer memory )

Step 10) learn any high level language of choice like Python or Ruby.

Step 11) stop debating over tabs vs spaces , emacs vs vim , angular vs vue, php vs Python , OOps vs procedular vs functional ( just know about all of them and when to use but don't fucking debate over which one is superior )..

Step 12) live happily and be healthy.

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Pessimist: a O(2^n) algorithm's performance decreases exponentially as input increases.

Optimist: a O(2^n) algorithm's performance increases exponentially as input decreases.

We are pioneers.

We build software, an extremely complex concept that didn't exist just 70 years ago.

We learned to harness its complexity and bend it at our will. Just stop for a minute and think about what happens when you load a URL in your web browser. The whole process.

In all human history, nobody has ever been the protagonist in something so complex as software. Yet we know that all of this wouldn't exist without a community of developers, sharing code and knowledge over the same system that they have created.

_We are dwarves perched on the shoulders of our fellows_

That's why even if nobody understands our work, I still think this is the most beautiful job in the world.

Biggest scaling challenge?
The imaginary scaling issues from clients.

Client : How do you cope with data that's a billion times bigger than our current data set? Can you handle that? How much longer will it take to access some data then?

I could then give a speech about optimizing internal data structures and access algorithms that work with O(log n) complexity, but that wouldn't help, non-tech people will not understand that.
And telling someone, the system will be outdated and hopefully been replaced when that amount of data is reached, would be misinterpreted as "Our system can not handle it".

So the usual answer is: "No problem, our algorithms are optimized so they can handle any amount of data"

You: O(n^3)
The guy she tells you not to worry about: O(n*log n)

Completed a project for my final year CS degree and my professor rejected saying it is of very few lines of code.Hope he learns to evaluate projects on complexity and logic rather than number of lines of code. :/

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

I wrote an algorithm which runs in constant time complexity, we can say it runs just O(K).

IF LIVES DEPEND ON A SYSTEM

1. Code review, collaboration, and knowledge sharing (each hour of code review saves 33 hours of maintenance)

2. TDD (40% — 80% reduction in production bug density)

3. Daily continuous integration (large code merges are a major source of bugs)

4. Minimize developer interruptions (an interrupted task takes twice as long and contains twice as many defects)

5. Linting (catches many typo and undefined variable bugs that static types could catch, as well as a host of stylistic issues that correlate with bug creation, such as accidentally assigning when you meant to compare)

6. Reduce complexity & improve modularity  -- complex code is harder to understand, test, and maintain

-Eric Elliott

Boss comes in and gives me some js code for syncing data (he hacked it together the other day, really messy with like 5 callback lamdas stacked into each other)

Boss: Make it faster and more reliable and add some progress indicator

So i look at the code and he literally pulls all the data as one json (20+ MiB). Server needs multiple minutes to generate the response (lots of querys), sometimes even causing timeouts....

So i do what everyone would do and clean up the code, split the request into multiple ones, only fetching the necessary data and send the code back to my boss.

He comes in and asks me what all this complexity is about. And why i need 5 functions to do what he did in one. (He didn't -.-). He says he only told me to "make it faster and show progress" not "to split everything up".
So I ask him how he wants to do this over HTTP with just one request...
His response: "I don't care make it work!".

Sometimes i hate my job -.-

Theory:
The least experienced developers write code with the higest complexity.

When everything has been abstracted..
While I think it's encouraging to newcomers into the field of programming they should always strive to delve into the abstracted details.. The amount of complexity that we deal with 'infinite'.

Sad reality!

Fuck those who cover their incompetence with complexity. Fuck those who fall for their shitty tricks. Fuck you for depriving me of any sense of accomplishment with overcomplicating everything to show how smart you are when you are not. Fuck you for creating a culture of overthinking egoism instead of shipping and finding out who was right. FUCK YOU IN THE ASS YOU BIKESHEDDING, MOTHERFUCKING CUNTS!

"Your resumé looks really good. We would really like to hire you. But you need to do this completly job unrelated test/coding challenge first."

----

"Is the test Android related?"
"Yes"
*Opens Test* -> "what ist the complexity of this function (written in c)"
*Scrolls*
"Implement algorithm xyz in Go lang"
*Closes test and breaks something*

----

"You will need to Code on a small Android projekt so we can see how you work"

"OK, how much time will i need to plan for it?"

"Our lead dev decided to make it small so its only 4-5 days."

----

What is it with all this stupid hiring test these days? And what do these recruiter think?

O(oh).....

Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.

I put those words on the wall in giant vinyl letters, and I point to them every time someone asks me "can you add a frontend button which checks this external API and stores the correlation between the amount of rain and the sales numbers of purple buttplugs inside the user profiles?"

People always ask for one more column in a table, one more paragraph under an image — they never ask for replacement or removal of items.

So I force them. Want a feature? Fine, if you point at something of equal or greater complexity to delete.

One day at a doctor who started a small conversation:
Doc: What is your job?
Me: I am a software developer, I write computer programs basically.
Doc: Interesting. How does it work?
Me: Oversimplified you have special languages to tell the computer what to do and then this is converted into a program you can start on your PC. The languages are a bit like basic english (thought of Pascal at this moment).
Doc: So then it is a pretty simple job.

Me thinking: OMFG yes that's why I studied it 6 years, because it's soo easy.

Me thinking at home: Next time tell them that you are a computer scientist and that it is applied mathematics basically. Maybe then they will get a clue of the complexity. 🤔

I think I figured out why so many companies jumped on board the Agile approach. Companies heard Productivity Bonus and Put Stuff into a List Of Things to Do, and left out all the rest of their responsibilities. One of my past companies was like "We're going to take an Agile approach to everything! Except, we're not going to shield developers from everyone who has stuff in the backlog, and we're going to have other meetings during the day on top of the scrum meetings to check on your progress, and we're going to measure points in time instead of complexity".

I feel like the creators of the Agile Manifesto would be really upset at all of the poorly implemented processes. Because all of us developers are pretty upset.

Junior dev:Hey,see my code works :)
*After analysis of code*
Senior dev:Let's talk about complexity bro
Junior dev: shit :(

"I think most programmers spend the first 5 years of their career mastering complexity, and the rest of their lives learning simplicity. " - Buzz Andersen

so i posted this image on my facebook wall(my business depends on facebook) and my father commented, check 1000 times then 😐
i wish i could say, it is not that easy, but i feel it is better not to say anything then explain the complexity of programming 😢

Manager: I want the front ends to be more dumb, too much logic is happening on the frontend.

Me: both of the sites are just multi step forms, I’m confused about the complexity part.

Manager: yea but don’t we have a bunch of third party api calls?

Me: we have 4 and they are public facing apis.

Manager: yea, make a new api and move this api calls to the backend and I want both frontend teams to send the same shape payload.

Me: but…

Manager: oh and I don’t like how the business team does the a/b testing and splitting traffic, let’s move that to the backend as well.

Me: but… that a/b testing platform they use in ran by another team and they have a full set of features for business analytics…

Manager: yea let’s just replicate those features and move them to the backend.

Me: but it’s a product!

Manager: look! You are the best backend engineer we got! I know you can do this!

Me: I lead the frontend teams…

Manager: ….

Manger: good news we are giving you a promotion with raise you are now a senior engineer.

Me: I confused but happy… I think..

Time complexity : O(😂)

*Got a request for installing and configuring an online shop for a client*

Me: Do you have a web space already?
Client: No, I don't want to pay for it. (FYI: They only cost about 20€ a year)
Me: Okay, but free hosters are often slow and unprofessional. I really do not recommend using free hosting services.
Client: Doesn't matter, do it.
Me: *Working on the shop for several weeks, finally goes online*
One week later, client contacts me saying shop is offline. I realize the free hoster he used shut down their services (bankruptcy), resulting in the loss of about 90% of the work that I had done (no proper backups due to complexity)
Client: How can that even happen? You'll redo the shop, right?

♪~ ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

"LeT's uSe gRaPhQL!" They said.

"It EliMinAtEs cOmpLeX aNd vErBoSe REST coDe!" they said.

Me sitting here for hours waiting for the backend team to fix major regressions every time they push the smallest "updates" to staging... 🤡

Call me a boomer but I can't help but feeling graphQL makes things MORE complex than REST... either that or the backend devs have no idea what they are doing

!rant

Yesterday a friend of mine asked if I could help her with an assignment. The goal was writing shortest path agorithm in excel. I told her I don't know excel or VB but I will look into it. I didn't even know that we can code in excel 😅 After 1,5 hours of research and coding I writed a well documented code that does the job (with n^2 complexity of course). I feel VERY motivated after this. Because I did well job at an unexperienced environment with a language that I don't know!

Tldr: my new favorite ide is excel.

I've been locked in a room with another dev for 2 days working like insane to remake a outdated crm system. Had to inform the department lead that the deadline isn't possible and we need another week. Got questioned about what we had been doing the past days, redesigned the database, migrated data, frontend etc. Boss goes "that's all you manager in 2 days?" We went in with 2 slides and had to design and plan everything from scratch.
I lost count of how many rounds and added complexity happened in 2 days when Customer came by. Now there is going to be a board meeting with PM as he complains that the project is taking too many resources and should be killed. I invited myself to that meeting to defend the work done. Hold my laptop and watch this.

Do you know what is world needs?

Good fucking tutorials for all programming languages.

Every time I want to learn a language it's a fucking mess. Tutorial here, tutorial there. Read the docs, it's fucking outdated. This person using this design, that person using that.

I am so tired of this shit.

also, for a simple example most website uses some complex architecture, something they think is the next thing.

Even searching for a simple QT singleton pattern gives me a webpage from QT Wiki which uses templates, typedefs and this shits to just show a FUCKING EXAMPLE OF THREAD SAFE SINGLETON.

I really wish there's was a greater platform for this. A platform that follows some certain standard rules for tutorials.

Big-O Emoji

Dev: So we need around $50-100 a month to activate and use some key services that would greatly reduce our backend complexity. Would this fit into our budget? Actually, we've never really discussed in general what sort of tech budget we have to work with...

Management: UNTIL WE HAVE SUSTAINABLE REVENUE, OUR TECH BUDGET IS 0

FullStackClown: 0? Are you serious? You can't spare a few hundred dollars TOTAL over the next 3 months until our next round of funding clears?

Management: ALSO WE ARE REALLY GOING TO NEED YOUR HELP TO FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT FROM THE TECH SIDE

FullStackClown: Oh no... we've gotten to the classic point where they think tech is the thing that will solve their problems... abandon ship...

Adios Motherfucker!
Finally got that pile of misery finished. That simple ticket exploded in complexity and had quite a bit of scope creep. So so glad it's over. I mean, apart from code review and QA. But still. It's done!

Also: I may have been drinking already. Clearly not enough from the painful lack of typos and silliness. Gonna go work on that.

Complexity of algorithms

Today i implemented something of such a complexity that the part of my brain i am in could not follow it.
(Really guys. I did not know what i was doing. I only knew i had to do it exact this way)

This feeling when you are in a tunnel and unstoppable. I even documented what i did.
Sadly i do not even understand my thoughts there xD
I wrote about three hours straight and then run a test. And the only mistake was a variable not filled as described. Used another one and it run smoothly as hell.

Today i will drink a beer on whatever part of me did this. Cheers

I really hate fucking Wordpress!

I hate it's stupid API, with it's stupid hooks and actions and all those stupid functions and no fucking logic to any of it!

I hate it's stupid plugin system, with all that fucking overhead that brings no real value and adds all that complexity for nothing!

I hate stupid fucking multiple calls for the same fucking assets, loading them over and over again because every stupid plugin calls them again and again!

I hate motherfucking SHORTTAGS, or whatever the fuck they are called!

I hate that every stupid fucking plugin and shortcode and fucking every little fucking piece of HTML comes from a different fucking place, with different fucking structure and different fucking classes and stupid fucking loading seaquences that make no fucking sense!

And I hate fucking page builders !!!!!

Fuck!!!!

I should be fucking coding on this fucking peace of shit, but I just cannot fucking take it any more!!!

IT NEEDS TO FUCKING DIE!

It should be relegated to the darkest corners of the internet and all the servers that have it's fucking code anyware on their systems should be disconnected and buried in the deepest pits of hell, just to be sure it never, EVER, surfaces again!!!

AAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!

Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".

They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.

Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.

So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.

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

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

Y'all ever notice how the size and complexity of a project is a source of pride for those whom created the project, and a source of dread for those who need to maintain it?

difference between O(n) and O(sqrt(n)). 🤓😋

I hate it....

"Simplicity will stand out, while complexity will get lost in the crowd." - Kevin Barnett

O(N³) 😨😱

I found university very worthwhile, mainly for what it exposed me to that I wouldn’t have necessarily learned otherwise. University exposed me to a lot of knowledge which allowed me to discover the fields and concepts that really interested me. It also forced me to learn math, and I’ve come to really love mathematics, even though my knowledge is still not that deep. I really respect and appreciate math now that I have more than a superficial understanding of it.

CS-wise, the things that have been most useful in practice have been complexity, data structures, concurrency, and others, but complexity is probably the absolute most important thing to at least learn the basics of.

I would not say that university is a necessity though. You can absolutely get by teaching yourself, especially if you are disciplined/interested enough to keep doing it. The important thing is to learn *what* to learn.

I’m pissed.
I had previously ranted about being assigned to a very messy project. I spent 3-4 months alone adding features and CLEANING things up.

Recently, there had been talks about a new major development phase on this project. But things lingered and the day before I’m to go on vacation, I get the news that this new phase starts in 2 days. Since I’m going to be on break they’re putting other guys on the project who don’t know anything about it.

Fast forward two weeks later.
I’m back from vacation.

I find out one of the guys has strong opinions about doing things certains ways… but unfortunately they are "ways" of unnecessary complexity, abstraction and verbosity.
After just a couple of weeks I’m already lost in the complexity of his code, which supports features of VERY LOW complexity. Fuck, has he ever heard of KISS? Has anybody heard of it where I work?

Now I have to spend my mental energy trying to make sense of this pile of crap rather than actually spending it getting things done.

Worst part of being a dev?

For me it's putting myself into infinite loops wrestling with my own self doubt. Is this really how I want to solve this problem? Could this code be cleaner? Surely there's a better way to do this? Am I adding unnecessary complexity? Is this going to come back and bite me in x months? And so on...

In fact, most days I just feel like an imposter.

Why is C++ the first language taught in schools when Ruby is a much simpler and fun language?

History says because the courses didn't get updated.

Conspiracy theory says it's to keep out people who can't deal with complexity.

Best tool:
Your hands!
- incredibly flexible
- express a lot of commands trough very little code (just raise the middle finger and tell me if you are not expressing something VERY strong with VERY little complexity)
- reusable
- interfaces
- smells of good soap

Worst tool:
Your brain
- highly power consuming
- wrinkly, ehw!
- overthinks a lot
- imposter syndrome
- hooked on sugar like it was cocaine
- hooked on cocaine like it was sugar
- refuses to comprehend chthulu

We did a small automated review on our code base at work. We discovered that multiple single functions written by my colleagues have a cyclomatic complexity of over 420.

I can't think of words to describe how shit that is.

It's contagious! You have to be safe 😂

So today I saw another 'OOP should die' article.
And I decided I should google around a bit to find out why.

Reasons I found:
- Things get too complicated
- Things get too abstract (same as the above really)

But when I search for alternatives, only functional programming and different ways to use OOP get mentioned.
I still don't get why OOP is supposedly bad though.
Maybe my 20-30k LOC projects aren't big enough to see it?

For me the abstraction works very well. The abstraction is used to keep the complexity low(er).
And the different ways of using OOP are a plus-point for me. (Like the Entity-Component system)

I don't know enough about functional programming to be able to say it's better or worse, but the ideas behind it a perfectly usable in languages like C#.

So if any of you have a good concrete reason to not use OOP, please feel welcome to tell me in the comments :)

Feels so good to refactor code and remove unnecessary complexity

cant stop laughing...

Matryoshkas are better companions than Ducks, and here's why:

-Made with wood. The material of Men! No industrialized rubber to spread Capitalist propaganda

-Multi-layer. Explain your code with different levels of complexity. Babushka Matryoshka is keen on C!

-Never feel alone. Maybe you want some intimate one on one, maybe you want a whole party of helpers, all thanks to pocket dimensions (included with the Matryoshkas).

So what's your excuse for not having a Matryoshka Comrade cyka!

Well fuck you too Swift! Your mother is to complex to be solve in reasonable time!

Okay so I have been a consumer of devRant for a while now but never posted anything. This is my first.

So yesterday I modified an existing method(some very minor changes!!). Today after coming to the office I see that I have comments from Sonarqube stating
"Reduce cognitive complexity from ** to 15.

I get that it is a good measure to maintain readability but this refactoring is not part of my change at all and any mishap can break the whole code base!!!.

My code even won't build because of this company restriction that there should not be any issues from Sonarqube.

I really want to bash my head against the wall right now.

Deleting code and cutting out half the loc in a file and eliminating complexity is the best feeling in the world 😎

Scrum. And agile. And people over-communicating. And estimating work complexity on a prototype. And people in general. I like nights, when all annoying people just shut the fuck up and sleep.

what's the thing that reminds you, that you are a developer?

I said "the time complexity of finding my car in this parking lot is n factorial".

Clients that barely can turn on their computer that have opinions on how much complexity and time is involved developing X feature. I'm no rage-o-holic, but that is one of those rare things that make me want to stab someone in the face.

Boss: I want Module 4 (regular complexity) done by tomorrow.
Me: *with not enough experience to get it done within a day. Still does it by staying up all night*

Next Day

Boss: I didn't want this, skip rest of the modules and jump to Module 10 (extremely complex) and I want it tomorrow.

Me: ;_;

I’ve come to the conclusion that developers who like react have never used it for anything even remotely complicated.

Because here’s reacts dirty little secret; it doesn’t scale. Not even a little. It’s flexible, but that leads to every developer writing their code in a different way.

It’s simple and easy for simple side projects, but as soon as you have to pass state to a child component, you’re fucked. And god help you if you’re modifying the state in said child component. You can try using redux, but that’s a bandaid solution to the real issue.

There are better alternatives, namely Vue. There’s no need to write unintelligible code that’s a mutated hybrid of html css and js. We as web developers realized mixing these technologies was a bad idea a long time ago.

React simply doesn’t scale. It’s flexibility, complexity, and the awful code quality it leads to makes it a nightmare for large projects with multiple developers

Some of its concepts are interesting and useful though. It’s functional concepts allow for easy code reuse, among the other benefits associated with functional programming

I sincerely hope that the hype around react dies out, and a new framework emerges that takes the best from react and fixes the glaring issues it currently has

A lot of people are very good at making extremely complex and hard-to-read React components.

Very very few are good at making clean and easy-to-understand React components.

Happiness is refactoring a function with complexity > 415 to less than 15 😍🤘

I just came across this piece of recursive code, as much as I can guess this should be an infinite recursion but somehow it executes and does terminate. Can anybody tell me how this happens and what will be it's time complexity ?

Tfw you *have* to tell the client it's *technically* possible, but at the cost of work and complexity... and they come back with "let's simplify the whole thing then" *.*

!rant

I bitch a lot about the complexity of Rust. But every time I do it I go ahead and applaud just how fucking good the compiler messages are.

A fucking thing of beauty.

So we decided to adopt Scrum where in manager(scrum master) picks the stories for dev, changes them during sprint and also decides the complexity of task. so much for a servant leader!!

Got an assignment in school to make an easy project in c for embedded real time processors with a free complexity level (it was really early in the course and many had never been programming before).

Since I've been working a few years in development I decided to create an own transmitter and receiver for an own protocol between processors (we had just spent a week to understand how to use existing protocols, but I made my own).

The protocol used only 1 line to communicate with half-duplex and we're self adjusting the syncing frequency during the transmission. I managed to transmit data up to 1 kbps after tweaking it a bit (the only holdback was the processors clock frequency).

Then I got the feedback from our teacher, which basically said:
"Your protocol looks like any other protocol out there. Have you considered using an UART?"

Like yeah, I see the car you built there looks like any other car out there, have you considered using a Volvo instead?

So I saw this argument between two intellectual titans on Quora about C vs C++. It was pretty amusing lol.

First Guy: “C programmers are the Amish! They’re afraid of change. C++ is a better C because it repairs it insufficiencies like classes and namespaces.”

Second guy: “C is fairly consistent, while C++ is inconsistent in many places. It performs so many allocations without you even knowing it. It’s complexity is very distracting !”

uSE AnY pRogrAmMinG L@ngu@g3 yOu liKe.

1nTervi3weRs Do N0t CarE aBouT tHe L@nGuAge.

Fuck you. Stop asking time complexity or space complexity of functional code. No one fucking knows.

Don't you guys feel like sometimes we make a huge deal in regards to what is basically grabbing a bunch of shit from a db and making it display on a flipping website?

I sometimes feel bored at how repetitive this shit is. Its the same shit, with various degrees of complexity to do that get data and post data or update data.

I dunno man, sometimes i just feel like there is too much for something that is inherently simple.

"A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want."- Niklaus Wirth

fuck time zones and time changes, why the fuck we don’t have one time on the planet and one date that is just day.
No month, no years - all the complexity would be gone, day wouldn’t have 24 hours but it would be something more precise, there won’t be a second

time that earth goes around sun is

365,25964 days

31558432896 milliseconds

we should start count time differently so it’s not relative in space time continuum, what should be relative is the mass

This is hilarious af!😂

while reading rebecca & brain's book on object oriented software. I realised that the programmer is a special kind of person. the complexity he can handle, the struggle to implement a system, from input to output, satellite control, AI, robotics, heck, even the planning required for a simple android app, the complexity is overwhelming at first, then you get your jotter and break it down into parts, and you drive yourself to the edge of sanity figuring out an algorithm, then you go over that edge implementing it, but oh that great super hero feeling when you finally get something to work exactly as specified, I'm not sure people in other professions can understand the satisfaction. I'm very young in the whole programmer world, but I'm growing fast, I'm just really grateful programming found me, I mean, can you think of something else you'lld rather do? yeah, me neither.

Programming contest assignments, first level:
1. "...if you don't know how to return values from a function, you can just print them"
2. "...if you don't know how to read files, you can assume data is in global variables"
3. Required recursion
4. "...and estimate its time complexity.", "You may pre-process the data, but use at most o(n^3)", "your algorithm must use under n^3 operations"

That escalated quickly!

Interesting..

From the book Effective Java, third edition:

"1997, when Java was new, James Gosling (the father of Java), described it as a
“blue collar language” that was “pretty simple” [Gosling97]. At about the same time,
Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) described C++ as a “multi-paradigm language”
that “deliberately differs from languages designed to support a single way of writing
programs” [Stroustrup95]. Stroustrup warned:"

"Much of the relative simplicity of Java is—like for most new languages—
partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness. As time passes,
Java will grow significantly in size and complexity. It will double or triple in
size and grow implementation-dependent extensions or libraries."

Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++)

Reviewing some code the other day, seeing a lot classes like:

SimpleThis
CoreThat
BaseSomething

I get the idea..Microsoft is doing it...disguising complexity with clever adjectives.

I think in my next project I'm going to start naming things like

SpaghettiMonster
GodClass
Repository (cause, every framework needs one)

Then in a year and a half-dozen other devs adding their bits, someone asks "SpaghettiMonster...WTF?...why is this data access called..<dev looks at code> Oh good Lord ...oh well...at least the class name is accurate"

I want honest opinions. Do you think the following is a good or not so good interview question. Why or why not? Defend your argument.

Define a function where the input is a list of integers. It should find and return all the unique sets of three within the list that sum to x.

For example, given the list [1, 3, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15] and with x = 16, the function would return [(10,5,1), (13,2,1)]

If the candidate presents the trivial solution with time complexity of o(n^3), ask if can be done in o(n^2) or better.

Developers who think complex code is good.

"Oh, lookie here, I can swizzle methods and inject dependencies in the runtime!"

"Although we have no valid use case, let's use dependency injection and follow the commandory stateor patterns because I watched a video."

Just because you learn something new that looks cool does not make it practical, you tosser.

Warning: This contains spoilers for Silicon Valley S4 E10:
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At 5:35 Gilfoyle says: "In order to hold that much data we would have to go RAID 0. [...] If we lose even one platter, we lose Melcher's data. Permanently."
But my question is: Why use RAID at all? Just storing the data without RAID would reduce the complexity, and if one disk fails, only the data on that one disk is lost. Also, I doubt speed is a priority at that point, since the whole thing is running on a home broadband connection, which something like a WD Gold data-center-harddrive (200+ MB/s) can easily max out.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to pay the broadband bill out of their own pocket, instead of moving tons of server equipment to Stanford?

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

An intern approached me for help in one of their past exam questions. They said they had already turned in the exam but just wanted to know the answer. The question was not that hard and I had a bit of time to kill so I helped them.

Me: So, to make it O(n), you have to make it a double linked list, and keep a tail.

Them: But the problem requires us to solve it with a single liked list.

Me: You can just iterate it at the end to make it single-linked again. That costs O(n), so the solution is still O(n).

Them: Oh yeah right. I don't think we even need a tail though, we could just have a variable pointing to the last link.

Me: ...which is called a tail.

Looking for a second opinion/validation.

*Me: “Perhaps this simple and concise way to ensure the user doesn’t lose their data before they leave the page that requires non-zero yet minimal input from the user. (Read: ya gotta push a save/submit button)”

*Everyone else: Let’s pretend to read the user’s mind and perform relatively complicated functions behind the scenes, of which the user will most likely be unaware, that will add an undetermined amount of complexity to the development because we think it’s “where things are going,” by saving the value of a certain HTML element as it loses focus.

Edit: this is an exclusively-internally used app.

JS interview:
– we expect you to know the concepts of immutability, persistence, software architecture and systems theory, methods of analyzing complexity beyond the big-O notation, safe parallel code execution with web workers, WASM, modern web standards including working drafts, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, WCAG recommendations and web accessibility in general, UX strategies and modern graphic design trends. Nice 20k github stars you got there. By the way, what's your opinion on modern optimistic UX?
– I know this all but I somewhat disagree with some status-quo UX strategies
– unfortunately it's a no

PHP interview:
– Do you know how to wipe your ass?
– *excited hysterical jumping with head nodding*
– You're hired

Things story points are great for:
- Helping the team estimate their workload for a sprint
- Discussing the relative complexity of a task / story

Things I will slap you for, hard:
- Arguing that all the easy stories you plan to pick are actually infinite story points to make you look better
- Going "yeahhhh look at me I did 5 more story points this sprint than Bob, I'm amazinggggg"
- Trying to subtly change the story point assignment after you pick a task so you can do the above while doing sod all work
- "Hmm your team only did x story points this sprint, but team poopoo over there did x+10, what's going on?!"

we keep increasing complexity and making ourselves disabled

Is it just me or does changing the theme on Notepad++ to Deep Black make everyone's code feel like it has the complexity of Autodesk Maya?

TDD has not been proven in studies to provide substantial reduction in cyclomatic complexity or other metrics of software development.

[vent]
I am java dev with 5 yoe at a place which has really good engineering talent.
Was assigned a feature request.
Feature request requires me and one more older dev(in age, not in exp at company) to write the code. My piece is really super complex because of the nature of the problem and involves caching, lazy loading and tonne of other optimization. Naturally it makes up 90% of the tasks in the feature request. On the other hand, the older dev simply has to write a select query (infact he only needs to call it since a function is already written).
Older dev takes up all the credit, gives the demo, knows nothing but wrongly answers in meetings with higher ups and was recently awarded employee of qtr.
It looks as if I do the easy work whereas he is the one pulling in all the hard work.
Need advice to justify my work and make others realise it's significance, nuances of area and complexity of it.
Do not expect monetary benefits, just expect credit and recognition for the worth of work I am doing.

Hey fastlane!

Great tool and all, but your documentation is at 🤡 levels, I need to read 20+ pages to get a full overview and understanding. So far I've had to read a dozen plus blogs and stackoverflow posts to find hidden flows (authentication first to do this, etc. etc. etc.)

Don't market your tool as "reducing complexity & saving time" and showing one-liners in the docs when in reality there are lots of hidden steps and NOT one-liners!!!!!!

This is why everyone complains it takes 1-2 days to just get a freaking pipeline working!!!!🤡

Been hacking frontend for a while, know most of the perks and tricks of css and html, have implemented countless of projects with angularjs, have even created jquery plugins and gulp packages, have won hackatons in UX design.... Still, a SFO company turned me down for a front end dev position cause I could not find the K most frequent words in an array in O(n) time complexity...

When I interview a super cocky candidate:

"Write a merge sort algorithm that works in linear time complexity."

This was originally a reply to a rant about the excessive complexity of webdev.

The complexity in webdev is mostly necessary to deal with Javascript and the browser APIs, coupled with the general difficulty of the task at hand, namely to let the user interact with amounts of data far beyond network capacity. The solution isn't to reject progress but to pick your libraries wisely and manage your complexity with tools like type safe languages, unit tests and good architecture.

When webdev was simple, it was normal to have the user redownload the whole page everytime you wanted to change something. It was also normal to have the server query the database everytime a new user requested the same page even though nothing could have changed. It was an inefficient sloppy mess that only passed because we had nothing better and because most webpages were built by amateurs.

Today webpages are built like actual programs, with executables downloaded from a static file server and variable data obtained through an API that's preferably stateless by design and has a clever stateful cache. Client side caches are programmable and invalidations can be delivered through any of three widely supported server-client message protocols. It's not to look smart, it's engineering. Although 5G gets a lot of media coverage, most mobile traffic still flows through slow and expensive connections to devices with tiny batteries, and the only reason our ever increasing traffic doesn't break everything is the insanely sophisticated infrastructure we designed to make things as efficient as humanly possible.

@linuxxx’s recent post inspired me to try out linux again and see if I want to use it as my primary OS. My past experience with linux has always been endless fiddling with settings or drivers or whatnot, so I was wondering if you’ve got advice on what level of complexity is appropriate in solutions. E.g. if using the terminal and changing a bunch of config files is normal, or if that is generally unsustainable on the long term.

Thanks, I can’t wait to see how this experiment goes 😄

Oh gosh, if you like building stuff, how do you find a job that is actually building stuff instead of dealing with software complexity bs, bureaucracy, red tape, processes to justify other people’s jobs… 🤦‍♂️

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

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

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

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

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

"Complexity is the enemy of reliability." - Kyle Matthew Hansen

When do you know something is being overdesigned or overengineered?

The applications that the other programmer started building are killing me. He's using Clean Architecture and it has like a million different classes and shit. It's not messy or anything, but fuck it's overwhelming.

Just to figure out wtf was happening when getting the currently signed in user's email, I had to go through like 30 folder and files. Maybe more. All files were fairly simple on their own, but the entire flow was mindfucking me. Use cases, schemas, gateways, repositories, entities, models, etc etc

And that's the client facing application, I haven't checked the API yet, though it seems like that one is simpler.

The worrying aspect here is, any time anyone else has to mess with this, they'll also have to deal with this shit. This needs some really good documentation.

I've now worked on both monolithic solutions and microapps/microservices. I gotta say I'm not sold on the new approach. There's so much overhead! You don't have to know your way around one solution -- no, now you need to know your way around 100 solutions. Debugging? Yeah, good luck with that. You don't have to provision one environment for dev, test, staging, and prod. No, now you need 100 environments per... environment. Now, you need a dedicated fulltime devops person. Now devs can check in breaking changes because their code compiles fine in that one tiny microapp. The extra costs go on and on and on. I get the theoretical benefits but holy crap you pay for it dearly. Going back to monolithic is so satisfying. You just address the bug or new feature head on without the ceremony and complexity. You know you're not crapping on other people's day (compilation-wise) because the entire solution compiles.

...and yeah, I'm getting old. So get off the lawn! ;)

Let's face it: I am and will always be a tinkerer. Yes, I know my ways around, I can sneak into legacy code bases easily and throw new stuff in there, I've seen software stacks. But scarcely sound design, really modular. Even from the cleverer, experienced ones. They can master more complexity, so they can handle more spaghetti. Some essay from the 80's had this grand idea to organically 'grow' software. That's how it looks like most of the times: cancerous, parasitic super fungi (armillaria). Yeah, we all know have to fight bit-rot and entropy, but it was all lost before already. We'll never get rid of legacy protocols, legacy code.
And even when we go green field, start a fresh. Yeah, take a great design, make everything new, after some months of throwing features and outer constraints at the thing, it's the same old mud again.
But we can still dream on: some day I will design great APIs, I will have great test coverage, documentation, UML design, autometed tests, fuzzing, memchecking, I'll work professionally, clean coder style.
Pfft forget it. Maybe change for consulting, because we'll continue to dream of the 'clean' code, so you can sell the next 'recipe', development method. It's like diets. As effective. For the one selling.

Do you all look for code complexity O(n) while coding? Or you make sure that your code runs and never look back what's happening ?

Because as per code review no one looks for code complexity and that's so sad

"What's important is not simplicity or complexity, but how you bridge the two." - Larry Wall

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

"When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity." - John D. Cook

In an algorithm class, professor introduced us to some simple search algorithms (bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, shell sort). He did a quite decent job and most of the students were able to grasp the code and understand the differences in those algorithms. But then he spoiled his whole lecture with one additional slide. There he proposed an optimization: Instead of using a temporary swap variable, we just could use the first array element (or the zeroth element, respectively: the one ad index 0) for doing all the swapping. We just had to document that, so that the caller would "leave the first position of the array empty", resulting in "cleaner code". And he did that in the same class where he used Big-O notation to argue about runtime complexity. But having the caller to resize the array and to shift all the elements by one position did not matter to him at all, because it was "not part of the actual algorithm".

Object Orientation is not a feature, it is an unneeded layer of complexity over a dying paradigm, Imperative Programming

The bigger the complexity, the bigger the rush when it works perfectly.

Probably joining my first real project. Truly no amount of university education can prepare you for the sheer scale and complexity of an enterprise software project. 100+ git repos, 5 different services running just to run the project locally, with tunnels open to 2 different DBs. It was daunting to touch anything.

For the people who can't sleep. It looks easy, but there's smth in it what makes it hard. Sooner or later you'll fail. Not even generated with my advanced sudoku generator. This one is generated by my sudoku js widget what does a bare minimal of complexity in its generated puzzles. Let me know if you're able to solve it

How do you explain to your client that no, you cannot have a perfect solution, because the algorithm is O(2^n)?

I mean, without requiring him to get a degree in CS. Also without making him think that you can't build efficient code because you're dumb. Or that the hardware is slow.

I definitely made a channel in the dev Slack I'm in for algo practice with the description bigOHNOtation.

There is a tool in my job that creates web pages by giving him what to display as content, and with that system, we can call applications from other web apps instead of re-implementing it.

But it has some flaws. Some that are natural, like its complexity.

And others.

I was calling an application from another webapp. I got an error 500. So I used a tool made by the enterprise to see the error in detail.

And the error 500 is in fact a 404 hidden.

Well, good job.

// O(n²) complexity
for(x;y;z){
for(a;b;c){
}
}

Dev's argument: "We use this everywhere, as long as it gets the job done! Time is money!" How ironic..

So you would rather make your processing speed suffer for the sake of saving time? No, clean code doesn't matter. No, we should not waste time spending even a mere microsecond thinking about writing better code or at least consider it. No, we should just vomit out bad code at top speed. Good idea, guys. Idiots everywhere..

Fuck Java because java is one of the worst first languages you could pick. In the following I’ll highlight two main issues. One issue, the complexity of Java, will make life more difficult for you immediately, and the other, the danger of developing myopia regarding programming languages and their capabilities, has the potential to hurt you for many years to come and possibly your entire career

Meanwhile ...

Swift SUCKS

Why?
Because of its absolutely useless complexity...
a total simple thing: i have a string and want to concat a integer with it, so:
var x = stringVar + intVar; right? NO
its var x = stringVar + String(intVar);
or getting the index of a element in a array?
var index = array.indexOf(element); thats logic, right??? Not for swift, gotta go with: var index = array.index(of: element); WTF??!!
And all the other shit: nil instead of null, int++? Nope.
And there are SO MANY MORE things, where u just think, Apple really though different........than all normal coding languages.......

I´ll honestly rather learn C and recode Ios or have a look at objective-c...

When you finally have some servers racked and configured in VMware to build a lab environment for the team....

But to access VMware you need to run citrix receiver from a mac to launch Chrome on Windows to access the VMware ESX Web UI but only on the HTML5 version as Flash doesn't work....

Now to spin up virtual machines that you can only upload via ova images but not locally cos that tries to show you the Windows citrix local files....

Do I even dare ask if I can access this via API so I can actually provision this with Ansible like I want too?!

There are a few email addresses on my domain that I keep on receiving spam on, because I shared them on forums or whatever and crawlers picked it up.

I run Postfix for a mail server in a catch-all configuration. For whatever reason in this setup blacklisting email addresses doesn't work, and given Postfix' complexity I gave up after a few days. Instead I wrote a little bash script called "unspam" to log into the mail server, grep all the emails in the mail directory for those particular email addresses, and move whatever comes up to the .Junk directory.

On SSD it seems reasonably fast, and ZFS caching sure helps a lot too (although limited to 1GB memory max). It could've been a lot slower than it currently is. But I'm not exactly proud of myself for doing that. But hey it works!

The intern next to me is currently giving telephonic interview sitting in his cubicle 🙄

"Simplicity and complexity need each other." - John Maeda

the two code review personality types

review activity:

- dev A: requests code review, sets dev B and dev c (myself) as reviewers

 - dev C comments: this review is marked with a complexity > 9000, touches > 20 files and has zero comments... also there's a lot of refactoring going on, making it hard for me to tell what the actual relevant changes are. can you please add more comments to this review?

 - dev B (10 mins later): approved review

Sometimes I feel guilty when someone has worked on some unquoted bit of work that they've invested some time in and everyone gives a low quote in poker planning - tend to give a little extra complexity points for them, gotcha back bro 👍

"Refractor this method to reduce its Cognitive Complexity from 110 to 15 allowed."
*Pan*

Ok let's do it :

label : for(....) {
if(...){
for(.....){
If(...){
....
break label;
}
}
}
}

*Pan Pan*

After listening to the deadmau5 plane crash story on h3h3 this exact thought play went on in my mind.

The universe wants to be uniform. Everything is the same, nothing reacts anymore.

Humans like the complete opposite. We like complexity and entropy. We create and we destroy.

But we are part of the universe.
So if you break this down into absolute math statements, they are contradicting.
So are we breaking the equasion?
Or are we part of the equasion?

...Are we the universe's self made antidote to itself?

My biggest sin is overshooting the problem - developing something "with the future in mind" which ends up way more complicated than it should be.
It works, works great, but nobody can maintain it because of the complexity, and because I usually write no comments in these situations.

But hey! At least I'm aware of it and working on fixing it in me.

"Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity." - Christopher Zeeman

Why the fuck is every tech lead and manager obsessed with the idea of breaking down tasks?
It's true some tasks can be broken down into smaller ones. But there are situations where a task needs to be done by 1 person in X days. Breaking it down into 2-3 tasks so that "they can be done in parallel" actually requires more efforts among devs, introducing unnecessary complexity and more risks.
9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 months ffs. I guess these people never learn.

Today’s topic in my Computability & Complexity Class:

The Halting Problem and The Undecidability Results

...sounds like my life

"Mutability increases complexity by adding the dimension of time to all objects."

By any chance can someone explain logarithms to me and how they relate to complexity growth? I can do the calculation but it's only from memorisation. I just don't understand how it relates to a graph.

so good to go back to code you wrote 6 years ago, and realize you improved both its readability and its computation complexity in a more recent rewrite

it's like you won bingo against yourself or something

"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity" - David Gelernter

"Elegance is not the abundance of simplicity. It is the absence of complexity." - Alex White

at one point in time, i had to work with a really junior backend team, they used javascript and neo4j as the database for an in-house developed community forum because "graph databases made sense" in the eyes of their tech lead

turns out that the team struggled quite a bit with it, and had some "unexpected complexity" problems when i asked them to add filters and sorting on the post endpoints

in the end, the "solution" they gave me was an endpoint that spewed ALL the posts so i could sort it in the front end

had they kept the same relational database they were using for the rest of the whole project, i'm quite sure it wouldn't take much to implement that (and their architecture was really performatic)

as a side project i rebuilt the whole forum in a weekend, but using postgresql as database, and it worked nicely, i even added some unit tests just for fun

gave myself a really big slap in the face after that, though

Google bloody captcha.

It works fine, until you have more than one form on a page then the complexity increases by 100000%.

Finally my colleague gets it working then I read an article that says bots use Google own speech recognition service to defeat it. Fun times.

Complexity is a choice!

"Complexity is the enemy of reliability." - Kyle Matthew Hansen

~They said~
Why don't we write code that runs in parallel on AVR, and yeah, keep it simple, we don't want complexity.

*Me*
:/ :|

I've been vibe coding not knowing that it was called that until yesterday. I always give up before I reach anything interesting because I get about 4 or 5 good responses before it starts forgetting things and breaking already working code. And it's not even that complex of an idea.

There is no way people are coming up with whole applications with any level of complexity with these things.

they say everything "old" is better, but in programming, dependencies in C was a mess. Shut up. Sometimes C is a cult enforced by those who don't even write in C. Now I build my projects with Parcel in less than a second with no configuration. It uses a full-blown AST for everything. If I want more performance with similar DX, I use fastpack, bringing build time down to tens of milliseconds.

art? charli xcx, sophie xeon, death grips, just to name a few. they made things that weren't imaginable before, ultimately pushing music forward. Hendrix is good but they're just incomparable in terms of beauty, complexity and sophistication.

literature? every old book I read feature same conflicts. they are so similar it's almost boring to read them. meanwhile, Erlend Loe delivers a complex idea without using a conflict (!) and without any character changes. that's insane.

"older is better" is getting old. it's time for you to seek for some other reusable gibberish to insult what other people create.

finally, let me remind you that you, my friend, create nothing.

I love having a brain

instead of being confused you can just see the magnificent complexity behind everything

it's so addicting and beautiful

Reminded again why every professional developer should at least read and understand basic algorithms...

Colleague: I don't understand why this agregation query is so slow, the counting is on the DB.

This function used to work fine... Now it sometimes hangs.

Me thinking: why does everyone assume db has unlimited resources and computing power so everything should be quick (no time or space complexity)...

Maybe if everyone understood this stuff our code base wouldn't be so shitty from the start...

Don't refractor for fun!

An anecdote from my previous company. A developer had written a shitty java console app for fetching stock prices. About 3000 LOC. just one java GOD class. So, when me and my friend looked at it, we were amazed how that code works with all that if conditions spanning 100LOC. so. My dear friend underestimated the complexity. Since it just fetches stock price and puts in database right. I can write it in few days and much better one. So, he started writing code in an OO way. Three days later I see he still working on it. Having a glimpse at code. The app is now Object oriented shitty and ugly.

Guess what new code never goes in prod too.

Learning
Don't underestimate complexity of app.
Be empathic about fellow developer. Don't think he has written a shitty code. Think why he had to do so.
Don't work on refractors if there is no one to guide you.

I may have accidentally found a legit factorization method that converts factoring to a combinatorics problem over a graph, with a time complexity that is the factorial of the logarithm of the semi prime being factored.

I don't know if this is supposed to be good or not, and I don't want to post it prematurely like I almost always do. Not at least until I study its properties better, but it's still a pretty interesting find I think.

Note to devs here. Please don't choose a framework for the hype at your work. Use it on your own time or company hackaton/learning time.

I'm looking at you angular.
Production ready doesn't mean sanity ready.
Now because some dev choose such technology for arbitrary reasons. (hype, latest acronym on CV). I spend more time debugging and understanding than I would if some simpler technology was chosen. Look at all the options then choose the simplest one that has and seems to have active maintenance. Zen of python is the best thing to happen in programming and I think everyone, even if you don't like Python should follow it. Save you and your colleagues brain time and ask for advice.
Also IMO react is probably third or second best option, higher if one requirement is to be react native. Angular is even lower because it's complexity is unforgivable when a dev has not enough front-end experience.

This night I had a fever and seen a weird dream. So, scientists discovered that our whole perspective is wrong, and the notion that anything is but a sum of its parts is now completely irrelevant. One can’t disassemble a thing and know how it works and what it consists of. Basically you want to build a computer, you buy all the parts you need, but you can’t assemble it anymore — it just doesn’t work, and nobody knows why. Same is true for cars, industrial machines, software and pretty much anything that have something to do with engineering.

So, earth went into riots, massive layoffs occured, world economy collapsed, and the forces of what used to be USA, China and Russia joined to tackle the problem. A research was started and we found out that we now have complexity cores (!) that distribute emergence (!!) in an ephemeral way (!!!) and that is what makes things work. Theory of New Complexity (!) emerged, and all the engineers were required to go back to universities to attend lectures about how complexity works and how to make things in that new reality

>Be me, humble physicist turned quantitative developer
>Big physics nerd, but code for the cash
>Working on some quantitative finance software, all about risk measures
>Girl comes over one day, cute as a quark
>Think to myself, "This is it, time to make a move"
>Instead, brain decides it's time to explain my work
>Start rambling about refactoring, polymorphism, and data encapsulation
>She's looking at me like I've started speaking in binary
>She tries to steer the conversation back to normal stuff, but I'm stuck in a recursion loop
>Keep going on about my project, can't seem to stop myself
>She tries to stay longer, even tries to show interest in my work
>But the more I talk about algorithms and time complexity, the more her eyes glaze over
>Eventually, she gives up, says she has to leave
>She leaves, probably thinks I'm more interested in my code than her
>mfw I realize I've chosen code over companionship
>Why am I like this?

Production goes down because there's a memory leak due to scale.

When you say it in one sentence, it sounds too easy. Being developers we know how it all goes. It starts with an alert ping, then one server instance goes down, then the next. First you start debugging from your code, then the application servers, then the web servers and by that time, you're already on the tips of your toes. Then you realize that the application and application servers have been gradually losing memory over a period of time. If the application is one that don't get re-deployed ever so often, the complexity grows faster. No anomaly / change detection monitor can detect a gradual decrease of memory over a period of months.

I found out the importance of time complexity. It might not seem like a big difference between O(1) and O(2). But there's a big difference hardcoding 500 lines and 1000 lines of data.

I made a navigation app for school using dijkstra's algo. However it had no data available so I had to hardcode it. Long story short, there was a ton of hardcoding. Always try to improve the time complexity of the code you write.

Do you know why my mom likes me so much?

Because my mom asked me to heat up all the food. And I did it in O(1).

Dev boy to Dev girl: "What's the time complexity on you loving me, baby?"

Dev girl: while(iExist){
Int n = Random.Next(1, 100);
for(int i =1; i < n^4; i++){
Console.Write("..."); } }

Dev boy: Assert.Fail();

Projects you would do if time/money/complexity wouldn't matter.

"Complexity is the enemy of reliability." - Kyle Matthew Hansen

Anyone who codes like this?

if(IsThereAValue($("#txt_term").val(), true) == false)
{
}

this is too much!!! damn! complexity!!!
PS. He is my senior developer.

Why doesn't writing code doesn't go hand in hand with a breakup ?

Like you can solve complex problems but why did not save this one

What do you guys think of code review? It was supposed to find potential mistakes in your code base, and share your knowledge with your co-workers, right?
In fact I have very bad experiences with code review, not just with 1 company, but quite a few. Code review process always comes to something like this:

Reviewer: Hey, I don't like your solution A because of disadvantages A1. You should implement solution B, because of advantage B1 blah blah...
Me: Yes, it's true that solution B provides advantage B1, but at the same time introduces much more complexity to the code base than necessary, and has disadvantage B2. I am aware that solution A has disadvantage A1 but it is justifiable and easier to overcome than B2 imo. In fact, solution A also provides advantage A2 that you might not know...
Reviewer: No, you HAVE TO implement B because of advantage B1 blah blah *repeating why B1 is awesome again*

I feel like it's just people trying to shove their preferences down my throat. Either code review is useless, or the companies I work for do something very very wrong in code review. Anyway, it's really discouraging me fron participating in team discussions.

[Talk by a security expert. The main point was, complexity kills security.]

7 minutes later a friend via IM: Hey, let's use OpenStack! Just 33 micro services to install!

the industry we try to make for them their first inhouse app, is having a lot of data that we need to import to the app. (machines, workers, materials, products, etc). The problem is that they want to give them to us in excel files, instead of making data entry. So thats ok for start, but after some point of complexity and relations we figured out that it turns to be a deadend.
How do you manage situations like this, with huge old fashion companies??

Not dev but, enough for the story. Had an assignment to create a hashtable for my DS course. Asked a friend how he managed resizing and the load factor
Friend= tablesize*50
Me= what...
Friend= space complexity what...

At an interview, interviewer keep on hitting me with theoretical questions, why python don't have switch cases, what is default sorting in java etc... I told him I don't bother about theory, then this conversation happened.
I(Interviewer)
I: do you know time complexities?
me: Yes
I: okay, tell me a few sorting or searching algorithms which have logarithmic complexity?
me: binary search (with loud and confident voice)
I: he told, in worst case it will have O(n) tell me any other
me: *thinking*
I: what are you thinking? what is time complexity of merge sort
me: O(nlogn)
i: it's logarithmic....

Blake 1803: 📜"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower"
🌏🏖🌌🌻
Me 2017: 📱Impressive compression ratio, but what is the complexity of Sand to World decompression?

Even if Microsoft has done considerably steps forward in recent years with dotnet core being an open source platform, it still retains a bit of its microsoftian dna. Let me make an example. Start a new test project with xUnit. It doesn't log to console. Decide to use the standard Microsoft.Extensions.Logging that should be the new, performant way of logging. It comes with 4 providers and **it doesn't log on file system**. Bottom line: all the complexity of a complex stack without the solution you were looking at the beginning. Resorting to thirdy party tools to do the job (serilog).

Data scientists unite!
I am working on a face recognition solution to identify and tag different faces in real time and currently using chinese whispers algorithm for clustring. The more I think about it the more inadequate it sounds (number of faces encoded increase over time thus the complexity). I've heard about YOLO but cant really decide. Please enlighten me!

Oh my freaking gosh! Okay so im "lead tech" on the robotics team. Ive come up with several ways we can improve our system. I had it all planed out and calculated but when i run it by the teacher running the team, EVERY SINGLE FRICKING TIME they shoot it down and they say "that just adds another layer of complexity" and I just want to yell because sure its a bit more complicated but so the fuck what?!?!? It works (theoritically according to math) efficiently and more efficiently than what their doing which is almost unknown to me because why the fuck not?! And omg i sware my entire team has the attentionspan of an ant because any time i need them to explain something, they get dustracted with whatever the hell they get distracted with and they NEVER SHUT THE FUCK UP. Any who other than that being super annoying thats not the point. Point is, the fucking teacher is afraid of making things a bit more complicated for no good reason and ever idea i have they shoot it down so (even as lead tech, and main programmer) i feel extra useless and im not gonna be here next year, so idk what the fuck there gonna do when i leave. (Like seriousally, im not even being conceded, ive been programming for several years. The other programmers have no idea what there doing) but if they dont learn that complexity isnt bad this team will NEVER get higher in the competition.

I'm writing a couple of tutorials on web development, nothing really professional, just my perspective on explaining things from scratch.

It's funny how quickly things get hard to explain.
You try to explain web frameworks and you have to differentiate between client side and server side frameworks.

But some people don't know what client or server means.

So you try to explain what the client-server model is.

But then the word model is not clear to some people, it's like a jargon word in software, so you have to give some kind of explanation for the word.

And so on.

This complexity and layering of terms is normal on every science, but I feel terms deserve proper explanation and disambiguation, which isn't usually done.

So far I don't feel a lot of things are as complex as they are considered in an atomical sense, they are complex in the sense of requiring understanding of layers that are very simple in themselves.

It is quite a challenge to be the least obscure, to give explanations with the least number of possible interpretations.

I've been working on a side project for a while(many months) and I'm at my 3rd refactoring and concluded that the greater service I want to achieve the more complex the project become, nothing exceptional, except I feel like doing the effort of an entire team of software developers.

Someone else has/d such a feeling/experience? If yes, I would like to hear your thoughs/story(just curious ;)

Ps: soon I'll reveal some screenshots here :3

Exploring myself was always an existential dread for me, even in childhood.

For any arbitrary thing I always struggle to give straight answers to following questions:

Do I want it?

Do I like it?

The complexity of the topic itself doesn’t matter. From choosing what to eat to reading about ideologies, the fear and confusion remains.

Why does everything about Android have to be this verbose, convoluted and complicated?

Why are there no simple solutions to most problems? I have worked with Flutter and Go and none of these have the same level of complexity as Android.

It’s almost as if the Android team lists out the possible solutions to a problem and intentionally pick the hardest and difficult to understand.