Fucking crunchyroll hardcodes their access tokens in a Constants Class in their APK, technically that is a security issue.

What the actual fuck Crunchyroll!? No fucking wonder you got DNS Hijacked so quick, security is literally your second priority you dumbed down twats, get some real devs and some real QAs for fucking god sakes, you're tearing down your own system by inviting exploits.

Winner EVERY time?! This could be the best arcade machine for devs!

Found this at my local movie theater.

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

*PM looks at my code
*Deletes my constants, replaces with inline strings
*Changes order of conditions (that I tested)
*Hits save --> autoformats code into shitty looks
*Commits: "fix"

Legacy code.

Honestly though, this is some of the better legacy code I've worked with at this company. It's a nifty alert system wherein you can trigger sending messages to subscribers of that alert via whatever means (phone/email) they've entered.

I'll save you the technical analysis of its internals, but suffice to say it's actually pretty nice, with good separation of concerns, internal logic hidden away, dead-simple public interface, etc. documentation is kinda crap, but it exists (!), so that's a nice change.

but.

For some unknown and bloody bizarre reason, the thing breaks when a user wants both sms AND email notifications. Either by themselves work totally fine, but both together? nonono. Email alerts give ArgumentErrors, so something internal isn't correct, and SMS alerts complain about uninitialized Twilio::Error constants.

but.
they both work fine otherwise?

also, the two notification preferences aren't stored on the same object anywhere. if a user wants both, the user creates two AlertContact objects with different info, and when performed, the Alert basically iterates over these and does its thing for each, so there is no knowledge shared between them. totally should work the same regardless.

idfgi.

ALSO.
AND THIS PART REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

WHEN THERE'S AN ERROR, THIS THING DOESN'T LOG IT. IT STRINGIFIES THE ERROR OBJECT (basically just extracting the message) AND INSERTS THAT INTO THE DATABASE INSTEAD. WHAT THE CRAP.

So, I don't get a stack trace, line number, or anything. just the basic error message. instead of my alert text. because of course that makes sense and totally helps debugging.

aklsjfak;sldfj.
legacy code.

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

I’m on this ticket, right? It’s adding some functionality to some payment file parser. The code is atrocious, but it’s getting replaced with a microservice definitely-not-soon-enough, so i don’t need to rewrite it or anything, but looking at this monstrosity of mental diarrhea … fucking UGH. The code stink is noxious.

The damn thing reads each line of a csv file, keeping track of some metadata (blah blah) and the line number (which somehow has TWO off-by-one errors, so it starts on fucking 2 — and yes, the goddamn column headers on line #0 is recorded as line #2), does the same setup shit on every goddamned iteration, then calls a *second* parser on that line. That second parser in turn stores its line state, the line number, the batch number (…which is actually a huge object…), and a whole host of other large objects on itself, and uses exception throwing to communicate, catches and re-raises those exceptions as needed (instead of using, you know, if blocks to skip like 5 lines), and then writes the results of parsing that one single line to the database, and returns. The original calling parser then reads the data BACK OUT OF THE DATABASE, branches on that, and does more shit before reading the next line out of the file and calling that line-parser again.

JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK

And that’s not including the lesser crimes like duplicated code, misleading var names, and shit like defining class instance constants but … first checking to see if they’re defined yet? They obviously aren’t because they aren’t anywhere else in the fucking file!

Whoever wrote this pile of fetid muck must have been retroactively aborted for their previous crimes against intelligence, somehow survived the attempt, and is now worse off and re-offending.

Just.
Asdkfljasdklfhgasdfdah

[CMS of Doom™]
The gift that keeps on giving...
When you think you've seen it all after 7 months in legacy hell, you get another gift:

Let's say you use PHP, but your IQ is in the zero-ish range, then it is obvious to:
- use define() for constants in all your config.*.php files
- then include said config.*.php files multiple times
- and because define() doesn't overwrite the same constant, because it's - you know - a constant, you instead of including just do a file_get_contents() to read the PHP file as string and then parse the values by Regex.

The dev who wrote this was truly one of the devs ever.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

I started attending this IoT class in some computer training school. During my first class, I was early because I had the raspberry pi class earlier in the day. A guy came up to me and started chatting to me, he was bragging about how he created some big projects, how he works in his dad's company which develops IoT products (he codes it). Later on in class he talked about how he hacked his school's server or something and changed his marks. Whenever he brags, he has a tendency to use a deeper voice (which is pretty annoying).

Anyways so I thought he is pretty good and maybe I can learn a thing or two from him. A few class later, I started having my doubts, why? Because he doesn't know how to debug code, he copies the lecturer's code and still copies it wrong, and he doesn't know what variables and constants are. He uses IE and doesn't know about GitHub.

Now he asks me or the guy in front for help in class. He makes the class more fun, it's funny listening to him brag. Love it.

👋DON'T👋MAKE👋CONSTANTS👋IF👋YOU👋ONLY👋USE👋THEM👋ONCE👋TO👋CREATE👋ANOTHER👋CONSTANT👋

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

One of my former coworkers was either completely incompetent or outright sabotaging us on purpose. After he left for a different job, I picked up the project he was working on and oh my God it's a complete shitshow. I deleted hundreds of lines of code so far, and replaced them with maybe 30-40 lines altogether. I'm probably going to delete another 400 lines this week before I get to a point where I can say it's fixed.

He defined over 150 constants, each of which was only referenced in a single location. Sometimes performing operations on those constants (with other constants) to get a result that might as well have been hard-coded anyway since every value contributing to that result was hard-coded. He used troublesome and messy workarounds for language defects that were actually fixed months before this project began. He copied code that I wrote for one such workaround, including the comment which states the workaround won't be necessary after May 2019. He did this in August, three months later.

Two weeks of work just to get the code to a point where it doesn't make my eyes bleed. Probably another week to make it stop showing ten warnings every time it builds successfully, preventing Jenkins from throwing a fit with every build. And then I can actually implement the feature I was supposed to implement last month.

Spent an hour and a half renaming a method everywhere in a project from `feature_name` to `feature_name!`. There are a lot of constants, symbols, and other methods that use "feature_name" as a prefix (plus comments and spec descriptions), so was a little more difficult than normal.

Should have taken like 5 minutes with a proper IDE refactor tool. but noo, it was too difficult for RubyMine. wah wah wah. Stupid thing. Not even the search tool was useful -- it's limited to 100 results, and there were around 250 for that substring.

I ended up having to run specs repeatedly to find all the remaining instances, which took freaking forever. blahhh

Today's project was answering the question: "Can I update tables in a Microsoft Word document programmatically?"

(spoiler: YES)

My coworker got the ball rolling by showing that the docx file is just a zip archive with a bunch of XML in it.

The thing I needed to update were a pair of tables. Not knowing anything about Word's XML schema, I investigated things like:
- what tag is the table declared with?
- is the table paginated within the table?
- where is the cell background color specified?

Fortunately this wasn't too cumbersome.

For the data, CSV was the obvious choice. And I quickly confirmed that I could use OpenCSV easily within gradle.

The Word XML segments were far too verbose to put into constants, so I made a series of templates with tokens to use for replacement.

In creating the templates, I had to analyze the word xml to see what changed between cells (thankfully, very little). This then informed the design of the CSV parsing loops to make sure the dynamic stuff got injected properly.

I got my proof of concept working in less than a day. Have some more polishing to do, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results!

We learned Java in school this year. Everyone who did not comply to the coding style defined in some stone-age books, got a bad grade, including me, who rather used a "normal" style everyone uses. They thought us this:
CLASSNAMES, Constants, MethodNames, VariableNames, etc.
Worse than that, they used german names for pretty much everything including classes, variables and methods.

So python does not have constants and the only way to create one is to create a class with a getter but no setter.

WHAT.THE.FUCK or am I just wrong?

*Java*
Friend: So I can have variables on interfaces?
Me: Yeah, just that they are final and static
Friend: ...

Mocking hardcoded data in frozen constants in Rails is such a fucking pain! Why must this be so difficult!?

asfdfakldsjfuck

Hello fellow devRanters, look what I found in our API constants on this fine day!

LIST_USERS: '/api/GetUsers',
USERS_WITH_QUERY:'/api/GetUsers?Query=',
MORE_USERS: '/api/GetUsers?Token=',

You get what you pay for, you get what you pay for, you get what you- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGG!!!!!!!!!

Started cursing Salesforce and everything in the damn ecosystem to realise 2 hours later that I haven’t updated static constants 🤦‍♂️

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

!rant

What are people thinking when they are building datepickers (or any type of angular/jQuery plugin for that matter)?

Lets put all of the code in one file, place everything that should be dynamic and optimizable in constants, provide no localization support, finish it all up, publish it to bower and npm (so poor devs won't have to struggle) and last but not least don't accept pull requests with useful features for months!

For robotics I decided to write a program that would automatically tune a PID loop (a loop with three magic constants that tells you how much power to give the motors).

Being a high school student who hasn't been taught anything about the theory of PID loops or the right way to tune them, I had no clue what I was doing. So instead of actually learning the calculus to do it, I just made an evolutionary tuner that keeps guessing slight variations of the last-best three constants.

Basically, you press start and the robot spins in circles until you come back in 15 minutes.

First !rant. I'm working on a 2d game using Game Maker at school and I just wounder if putting constants up this way makes you cringe. Is there a better way? This code is only run when switching to a weapon and he values can be put into the shooting script itself. I just want to know how you put in mass constants in general coding or even at all.

In PHP, constants can only be of simple data types like strings or floats.

You can't make a database connection a constant because it's not a simple data type.
That makes the only way of accessing complex "constants" within functions using the keyword global... which is not encouraged and forces you to make the database connection global (that may not be convenient in some software patterns).
The last option is passing the database connection as a parameter (either to the function or to the constructor of the instance whose methods will use the connection)... which would be good if I didn't want to go full OO. Because it's a pain to do so.

So all in all, constants are not well supported by PHP.
Come on, constants...

One of the constants in my live is that I cannot type in dreams, no touchpad or keyboard will ever output more than three coherent logically keys before it turns into gibberish. Other interaction works, but no input for computers or phones.

Today I dreamed of assisting a guy to shutdown the Linux Server I set up, via remote. The dream totally derailed and was a bit boring. My dream characters realized that something is up and used a different keyboard. No dice. Visually it looked like Thai or so without the appropriate fonts.

Sometimes I am really wondering what my dream director is thinking.

Restarting regular expression parser from scratch has been good. I am somehow both much farther to completion and farther away from completion than I was in the earlier implementation.

Further in the sense that this implementation is going to be way more flexible to changes in the language

Farther in that I haven’t even got all of the regex parts added to the first stage yet.

But I’m feeing good about it.

Even if I did refactor it so my constants are in all caps and now feel like my core is yelling at me.

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

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

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

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

I've been working on an Emscripten emulation layer for a fledgling startup, and it's just a huge bitch. Seriously, Emscripten is the worst designed project I've ever seen. It embeds constants into a js file that it spits out. It turns out you can't fucking run the wasm that Emscripten emits without these magic constants from the js file.

Additionally, all the wasm imports that emscripten specifies are weirdly cased, with apparently no naming convention. They also use some weird, shitty vararg implementation when it already fucking knows exactly how many arguments are going to get passed to an import.

Also, there are a ton of broken things left over from when emscripten compiled to asm.js that they never bothered to replace with features from wasm. God knows how it even works.

Him: "dont put your constants in a standalone class, it defeats the purpose of OOP. A class is for methods and such."
Me (in thoughts): THIS IS PYTHON YOU OEDIPUS, WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO IF I DONT WANT MY CONSTANTS TO CLUTTER THE FILE??1?

But using the enum-class as superclass maakes it ok for him...

Coworker renamed constants in repo for her own code and left for 3 weeks... Even told me she replaced and fixed everything!

Unfortunately the renaming got together with a different functionality and have to rework every part where it's used next week...
Just one out of many problems at my work...
Fucking sucks...

public const bool DEBUG_THAT_SHIT = ConfigurationManager.ParseBool("debugThatShit");

public const bool DEBUG_THAT_OTHER_SHIT = ConfigurationManager.ParseBool("debugThatOtherShit");

public bool iMadeANewFeature = ConfigurationManager.ParseBool("newFeature")?true:false;

Fucking new guy, can you not fucking read the other constants and make them look the same? Apparently not and I am the asshole.

Shower thought: Most variables don't actually vary

God damn it, if you (libGDX) have default values for public methods then make those constants public. Now I am writing wrapper and I either create my constant with same value as your private one, or do some reflection black magic which will probably break after obfuscation. *sigh* Going with my copy of the constant, not happy about that...

const int pi = 3.14;

This is the worst example ever to explain what a constant is to students.
I knew a lot of guys who think that math constants and programming constants were the same thing

My big grievances when doing code reviews, lots of code reviews....

Constants. How difficult is to create constants files for reuse and readability?

Comments/java doc. I don't get any help by seeing this is an automatically generated block to get by check style.

*slap*

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

Just TYPO3 things:

in your config constants doing "styles.content.textmedia.maxWInText = 450" should basically crop all your images to a maximum width of 450 using ImageMagick except TYPO3 flips it's shit and won't do it.

After about an hour or so of debugging and guessing around with 2 other developers setting "styles.content.textmedia.maxWInText" to "500" will actually work. Every other number except 450 works.

Using TYPO3 is like preparing for hell.

I have spent my entire day code reviewing thinking ...
This developer must think all the lines are fighting with one another ..

I kid you not ! Every line of code has white space between it ....

To top it off ... all strings are initialized new String() then assigned to constants ......

*sigh*

There are a few constants in Software Development:

1) The requirements always change.
2) Don't trust input.

Silly me was so naive to ignore 1 and 2 and later I dealt with the consequences.

1) Oh, we have this new API and we're only going to build Google Maps interfaces with it. Nice, easy task. We won't have to address the other parts of the library, wooh! The next day: "Yeah guys, we kinda wanna use the other parts now". Me: sigh.

2) Simple task: I have my API accept CSV files so I can generate graphs out of them. What could go wrong? Provide wrong file? I caught that. Provide completely fucked up and garbled CSV? Whoops.

Currently introducing two coworkers to 180 kloc written by my predecessor over 5+ years time with tons of magic constants. I've been on the project for 5 months and don't know anything. They asked for the documentation and I gave them the look.

feelsbadman.jpg

Well fuck. I am experiencing over-engineering first hand.

I am the single dev responsible for developing a small feature but which is an identity to our whole product(feel free to guess it here). This is quite simple I thought, I can just modify the constants which are being used in the source code and I can finish it off in a week tops. I asked all the relevant teams over which this feature would have dependencies and they gave me a green signal. Setup Jenkins configuration and everything for this new feature. With a wide grin on my face, I sent out a pull request. Now the architect of our product declined the pr saying to change everything from the bottom up giving the reason that it would be configurable sometime later in the future. Now mind you, I get it if this feature could change over time and needs customability. But it has been the same since last seven years and would probably not change again for a couple of years ahead [you have to take my word for it.]. Its not that the guy is a douche or anything, he is one of the best dev I have ever personally came across and I highly respect and admire him. But there has to be a trade off between the effort you are putting in versus the benefit you get. Now I have to touch almost every file, super carefully look in the whole product if a bug creeps out from anywhere and change the existing code to a point where it doesn't even make sense to me anymore, and write tests ofcourse.

wubba lubba dub dub!

Friend: Wouldn't an enum be better than those int constants?
Teacher: yeah... Deal with it

Biggest influence was the Java coding style, where constants are ALL_CAPS and everything else is camelCase

I am tired and these constants look SO_ANGRY 😡

When elements of an union are distinguished by a boolean, VSCode's Typescript plugin can only do type elimination if I branch by "== true" and not if I just branch by the boolean.
This is because Typescript treats booleans as an union of the constants "true" and "false", and compile-time elimination can only be done if I use syntax that makes sense with unions. Logical evaluation, for some reason, doesn't.
The fact that this issue can even appear is deeply concerning.

Who from fucking IBM thought that implementing hundreds of Constants for MQ WebSphere was a fucking Good idea, when half of them can't even be used with pcf. Even when they would be usable their Documentation is like horse shit you can't find anything in there without spending half of the day looking for an explanation.

Organizing some documentation and variables & constants on a uni project I'm doing. Eclipse stop "\n"ing every time I switch things around damn it. It's almost 3am leave me be >:V

This is how to find the base needed for any integer value p, where p>=5, such that the logarithm always equals e in python.

log(p, e**(log(p, e**e))) # equals e

Doesn't do anything besides that but this is another identity isn't?

When you add a new method, two unit tests and the build breaks because you didn't use constants the way sonarqube wanted....

I'd like to call out the creator of "noise-gate" for connecting a dynamics compressor to a biquad, configuring them with some arbitrary constants and sharing this marvelous piece of engineering on NPM.

Imagine that I have written 1000 lines of code and imported many libraries. Sometimes I get confused when trying to use a name I defined earlier. In my mind is this name a class or a method, is it a local or global variable, is this a constant. So I came up with a way and it totally works, although my ide complains, but who cares, I use it anyway.
I use PascalCase for class.
camelCase for methods.
snake_case or lowercase for global variables.
kebab-case I don't use this
UPPER_CASE for constants
snake_caseL or lowercaseL with a capital letter L at the ending for local variable.
I hope this is helpful 😊🤔

Why is it that in every other goddamn programming language if a function takes a parameter of string you can specify a variable but you have to create a goddamn composed string in t-sql for half the ddl and server functions because they expect string constants ????

And still
This has HAD to have been a complaint for a long time now !
Maybe I want to populate a json configuration file or a table with constants and values for things ?

I know that building a cmds text isn’t that much different but it does add extra annoyances and it really is something that should have been fixed 12 or more years ago in 2008 !

I was away sick for a week. Come back to a chat log with messages about how the other dev team is trying to figure out a solution to a bug that they only show three services listed in the system.

Me couple of weeks ago on my second day in the project figured it out relating to a task I was doing. It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's a constant defined in the constants-file.

And the best thing: my team mate quoted me and said "Lankku figured it out last week". And it was passed down back to the team who had actually developed the whole feature and couldn't figure out why it was working so now. xD

THIS is powering the internet:

"[...] was a protocol number, similar to the third argument to socket today. Specifying this structure was the only way to specify the protocol family. Therefore, in this early system the PF_ values were used as structure tags to specify the protocol family in the sockproto structure, and the AF values were used as structure tags to specify the address family in the socket address structures. The sockproto structure is still in 44BSD (pp. 626-627 of TCPv2) but is only used internally by the kernel. The original definition had the comment "protocol family" for the sp_family member, but this has been changed to "address family" in the 4.4BSD source code. To confuse this difference between the AF_ and PF_ constants even more, the Berkeley kernel data structure that contains the value that is compared to the first argument to socket (the dom family member of the domain structure, p. 187 of TCPv2) has the comment that it contains an AF_ value. But some of the domain structures within the kernel are initialized to the corresponding AF value (p. 192 of TCPv2) while others are initialized to the PF value." Richard Stevens 'Unix network programming'