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My mentor/guider at my last internship.
He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?
Yeah that felt awesome.
Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.
Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊
He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.
Awesome guy!4 -
Breaking devRant news: we are extremely excited to announce the featured guest for the first episode of our podcast. He co-authored possibly the most famous software development book of all-time - "The Pragmatic Programmer" and is well-known for many other titles including "Practices of an Agile Developer." For the devRant community, one of his coolest/fun claims-to-fame might be that he is the inventor of rubber duck debugging, a frequent topic of discusson here on devRant. Beyond this, he is also one of the founders of the agile development movement. Our first featured guest is Andy Hunt (http://www.toolshed.com/about.html)!
As you can probably imagine, we're very excited to have Andy on the first episode of the devRant podcast and there's so many things we want to ask him. We want to give the devRant community a chance to submit questions too because we know devRanters will come up with fun questions. So feel free to just submit any questions you'd like us to ask on your behalf as comments on this rant, and we'll pick the best ones. Thanks!
25 -
"Ok, the site looks fine. Now let's move the style tag into it's own file."
*makes css file*
"WHY DOES IT HARDLY EVER LOAD!?!?, I checked the syntax trice"
*Spends 20 min. Asking friends for help, but none of them knows a reason*
"Time to ask the teacher, I guess"
*Teacher comes over, but has no clue either*
Teacher: "Give me the files, let's test it on my laptop"
*Css doesn't load there either*
*Teachers pair programming and trying some serious debugging technics. No progress*
*I decided to look at the sourcecode while refreshing the site*
1. Refresh: Css is loaded properly
2. Refresh: Css is gone, and source turned into various asian symbols.
Looks at the (default) file encoding: UCS-2
WTF NOTEPAD++, I SPEND 2 HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE YOU DECIDED THIS WAS A PROPER ENCODING!
Web programming seems fun.12 -
Do you know what's more fun than debugging multithreaded code?
Debugging networked, multithreaded code...3 -
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 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?6 -
Now I remember why I don't work from home.
It's 3pm and I've managed about an hour's work today -- most of which was debugging something really dumb. Lunch took me 2 freaking hours because I had help from a noisy smoke detector (EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! ad nauseam), and everything kept going wrong. Girlfriend went to the store to pick up groceries; they were order-online groceries from a store 6 minutes away, so idk why it's taken over an hour. Now the smoke detector is pretending to "go to work" by watching youtube, and when that gets boring, he fights with his baby brother and steals his toys.
Children are fun and all, but they require 98% of your attention. and fuck, nobody else in this house makes any money, why the hell am I stuck watching them? While working!?
asdfakshaslkgjasdg
Update: now the smoke detector is taking the computer apart with a random electric screwdriver i haven't seen in years, and the baby suddenly has no pants.9 -
I just released a tiny game for iPhone!
It's basically an attempt to mix 'Heroes of Might & Magic' and mtg.
In the screenshot my terminal says 'helloworld.cpp'. That's right, this is my first c++ program and I don't care how crappy you think this game is, I'm super proud of myself!
I've always worked in data science where managers assume I know how to code because there's text on my screen and I can query and wrangle data, but I actually didn't know what a class was until like 3 years into my job.
Making this game was my attempt to really evolve myself away from just statistics / data transforms into actual programming. It took me forever but I'm really happy I did it
It was brutal at first using C++ instead of R/Python that data science people usually use, but now I start to wonder why it isn't more popular. Everything is so insanely fast. You really get a better idea of what your computer is actually doing instead of just standing on engineers' shoulders. It's great.
After the game was 90% finished (LOL) I started using Swift and Spritekit to get the visuals on the screen and working on iPhone. That was less fun. I didn't understand how to use xCode at all or how to keep writing tests, so I stopped doing TDD because I was '90% done anyway' and 'surely I'll figure out how to do basic debugging'. I'll know better next time...
22 -
People say programmers are no fun!! But they don't know the truth.
We have big Ass container of emotions almost ready to explode anytime. We are spending too much time in debugging stuff one after another that having a free time is just a hoax to us, even when we came back home for sleep, it's only to dream about solution. We would be happy with debugging the error that is not letting us sleep for weeks.4 -
For a project day we had to write a game of our choice in Java.
"You should make this game using the JSwing library and make each component a JComponent"
Later I learned you can simply use a Bitmap as a canvas.
NEVER. EVER. BASE. YOUR. GAME. ON. SWING.
It inefficient to the top of my taskmanager. I had to wrap everything with something like a virtual playground where I had to manage everything myself to not roast my cpu.
I had alot more fun debugging hundred lines of C code with print statements than writing that shit2 -
I just started rubber duck debugging and this is wonderful. Also added a switch to my desk toys, so fun
6 -
Sitting at home debugging code for the fun of it when... "I would debug 500 bugs, and I would debug 500 more. Just to be the man who debugged a thousand bugs to fall asleep on the floor."1
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Debugging a system error with a good team of fellow developers/devops people is fun.
We had an issue on Friday where we were getting a pretty cryptic error in our error reporting system. A couple of developers and I got together with a couple of devops people and we worked it out well as a team and figured out a pretty complex issue in a reasonable amount of time with everyone playing a solid role.
Nobody tried to steal the show and everyone listened to each other's ideas on what the problem might be. Through and through a great debugging session and made me think about bad ones and good ones I've had in the past.4 -
Finally Spend two fucking days debugging shit until I figured it it. Freaking stupid shit encoding problems and old data combined isn't fun. Dafuq why can't everybody use UTF-8 or Unicode or something else but PLEASE stop using some old school IBM shit codepages.
Leckt mich doch am arsch mit diesem scheiß man -_-4 -
Uh-oh shit went wrong with umpteen thousand jobs in a pointer heavy, multi-threaded application in raw C. Fuck, some pointer gone wild?!
30 minutes later, after trying to find out how many jobs it takes to start failing. Noticed that it's about the default settings. Wait what? That's where the realloc'ing should kick in, check that.
Aahhhh. Maybe I shouldn't zero the whole buffer after realloc, just the new part. D'uh! -
Just read an article that really grinds my gears. Its about coding in other languages. Not programming languages, but literally other languages.
Btw I learned to code in Spanish and I'm not against coding in programming languages using variable names in other languages.
That's fine.
What pissed me off was that the author claimed that we should be able to code Fucking JavaScript in SWAHILI or other languages available. What kind of PC bullshit is that!
Coding is barely fucking readable and now we have to make standards for Multilanguage support. Just learn the less than 60 reserved words you lazy fuck and code with them! I leaned to code with shitty tutorials in Spanish and theres no 1000x resources out there and this author claims you can't code unless you know english.
Granted. It's easier but wtf not just learn it. When I coded in Java in Spanish, I didn't know wtf a Class was or ags meant. So what. I memorized that shit. How? By coding!
Why bring this PC shit to programming? The author thinks there are few programmers bc we don't support fucking SWAHILI in JavaScript. Fuck no!
Now if you want to support this initiative. Think of this,
...legacy code
...in 32+ languages.
Have fun debugging this thing.14 -
Commas.
I fix one display, and another breaks.
Now I’m getting “$$1002.99” and can’t figure out why. Where is this popup coming from? Where does the encrypted URL point to? What does this ajax call do? Where does the amount go? When does it change? Why is it a string now? Where does the total get defined? How far down the rabbit hole do I need to go?
Short short version:
I found something to try fixing. I made some changes, forced a crash to inspect, and… Joy! My log stopped updating. How long have I been debugging on stale data?
Skipping a long debugging session…
I discover a suspect instance var in a suspect method, and… i have no freaking clue where it’s being defined. It’s used in the class, but never defined in it. Oh, and the name is pretty generic, so searching for it is even more fun.
Just.
Qxfrfjkalstf.
WHO WRITES THIS CRAP?!
AND WHY DO PEOPLE CALL THEM “LEGENDS”? Like, really. That’s the word they use. “Legends.” I still can’t believe it.8 -
Anyone else developed a habit to structure verbal allday Argumentations in your head in Code syntax? Helps me alot to follow ones logic. Except when I'm arguing with my girlfriend. Sometimes setMood(angry) gets randomly called (bug?) and then every if statement seems to be valid, eventhough it should return false. An inputstream that contains my outputstream is initialized but .readLine() is never being called. Instead, the outputstream to my inputstream is being overly abused. Once we get dive deeper into our if-statement we will find a while loop with a mysterious flag. Noone knows it's origin. The while loop keeps printing out random concatenated strings until it overflows your own capacity. I would have said its while(true) but in fact there must be a timer in another very hidden thread or something that sets our flag to false. The other and only way I know to exit that loop is to call apology() 100 times (maybe a variable sets the boolean that could be deeply buried in her projectstructure like this CONST.VALUES.getMood().getRealMood().getTrueMood().TRUTHCONTAINER.angryMode=true)..
I wish I could get a stressball so I can continue theorycrafting and debugging. Its 4.30 am now, my better side is snoozing next to me. I bet making this a pseudocode would be fun.
Ps: I love my lady but I had to rent3 -
To quote Charles Bukowski:
"and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?"
I always have tendency to fall into feeling lonely and abandoned, but these days my life is tossing some of the wildest curve balls more than ever before.
The latest one yet just happened this Monday. My manager quit and there was no knowledge transfer, and it was not on the good terms with the company.
Now I'm the only member of my team, and I have to take care of some of the projects that I've never worked on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not setup for failure, and there are no expectations for me to know how everything works, quiet the opposite. But working with our clients and debugging the projects that I literally setting up on the fly had been a rollercoaster.
Second time in this company I will be looking for a manager in my department, and teaching them how everything works. Fun times.. fun times never change..5 -
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>3 -
Just spent 8 hours debugging an issue that had been sitting in my issue queue for a week. WooCommerce was claiming transactions were failing, but going through in the background anyway.
Can’t share any more specifics here, but the gist of it is that the server the code was developed on was set to PHP version 7.1, while the server the dev site was on was set to version 5.6 (which I didn’t even think was still installed, never mind the default...).
So yeah, fun times over a trivial fix.1 -
Making a Snake game. Let me explain.. I had just "finished"(We all know there is no finishing side projects) my first big, at least for me, project. An io game called torpedoed.fun [http://torpedoed.fun]. And yes, it is a desktop only, and also yes, it is not that fun of a game. Torpedoed.fun taught me a lot about developing such as how to debug effectively, backend communication, how to host a website, planning, and much more. After learning all this from torpedoed.fun, I decided to start a new project, a simple clone of the classic Snake game. I, to my surprise, was able to immediately think of several ways of implementing various parts of the game. I developed the entire game in the span of a few hours with hardly any problems! This experience of developing without constantly debugging every line of code felt amazing. If I wasn't addicted to programming before that Snake game, I was afterwards!
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Debugging is fun again.
@dfox, @trogus
please make Kotlin cape. I wrote 2 emails already and asked about this. please. Even React has separate cape. 😂
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I really don't get the frustration people have with debugging...
It's one of the most fun parts of programming for me.
I don't mean the missing semicolon (I use an ide cause I care about my time).
When all your seniors have spent hours on trying to find a bug and after a few days you're able to present a fix to them, that honestly is the best feeling, potentially better than "finishing" a product (let's be honest, it's never finished)1 -
My JS app can crash IE11. Totally reproducable.
Had a fun debugging session to find out how this is triggered. Happens inside a deeply recursive call in a library I'm using which redraws the DOM.
Found a hacky workaround to avoid that as I see no real solution. It's not like I'm responsible for fixing IE. These are the days where I'm happy I'm mainly a backend dev...4 -
I finally made my first production-level bugfix at my new job! 😄 After weeks of training and then being assigned a live bug, I resolved it quickly & elegantly, which helps prove my worth to the team.
Man, it's so gratifying to be making contributions that are going to affect real devices that actual people are using. It seems being a dev with a sense of purpose is nearly as important as enjoying what you do. ☺️ -
I've been using visual studio for years and always found debugging pretty fun. At my new job I have to use xcode and FUCK DEBUGGING IN THAT ILLEIGBLE SHIT TIER DEBUGGER. and fuck objective-c, at least you can ignore the objective part and just code c..
I never thought I would say this, but damn, I miss Microsoft.9 -
Why so much hypocrite Devs here ?
Examples :
I don’t use VScode because it sends telemetry.
Same for Windows 10
Same for half other products.
Like YOU don’t collect telemetry in apps YOU build. And if you don’t, have fun debugging without any data beside “It doesn’t work” comments !8 -
So we released to production today (Friday), not my decision.
All pages work fine expect for the one page which I added a new feature.
It worked fine in Chrome and Edge. But after release a customer who requested the feature said it doesn't work for him. Screenshot showed he was using IE.
Horror time.. it was evident that it has to be the changes to the JavaScript I did, but why does the whole page doesn't work.
So I started debugging. Nothing works on that page in IE11, it doesn't even load the fucking script file. Then I dared to change mode to IE10, it actually gave me an error in my script file. The bad IE has actually picked a mistake that other browsers didn't.
So, the mistake is fun part too.
I had the following jQuery (or Jake Weary) call
$.getJSON(
'/url',
{
argA: a, argB, b, argC:c
},
function (){
// did something
}
);
In second argument, I accidentally typed comma instead of colon. Chrome and Edge ran the script perfectly passing all the arguments.IE 11 failed to load script without giving any error and only IE 10 gave an error of expecting a colon.
I do not know which browser to blame.
PS I didn't try in Firefox, safari, etc.2 -
*laughing maniacally*
Okidoky you lil fucker where you've been hiding...
*streaming tcpdump via SSH to other box, feeding tshark with input filters*
Finally finding a request with an ominous dissector warning about headers...
Not finding anything with silversearcher / ag in the project...
*getting even more pissed causr I've been looking for lil fucker since 2 days*
*generating possible splits of the header name, piping to silversearcher*
*I/O looks like clusterfuck*
Common, it are just dozen gigabytes of text, don't choke just because you have to suck on all the sucking projects this company owns... Don't drown now, lil bukkake princess.
*half an hour later*
Oh... Interesting. Bukkake princess survived and even spilled the tea.
Someone was trying to be overly "eager" to avoid magic numbers...
They concatenated a header name out of several const vars which stem from a static class with like... 300? 400? vars of which I can make no fucking sense at all.
Class literally looks like the most braindamaged thing one could imagine.
And yes... Coming back to the network error I'm debugging since 2 days as it is occuring at erratic intervals and noone knew of course why...
One of the devs changed the const value of one of the variables to have UTF 8 characters. For "cleaner meaning".
Sometimes I just want to electrocute people ...
The reason this didn't pop up all the time was because the test system triggered one call with the header - whenever said dev pushed changes...
And yeah. Test failures can be ignored.
Why bother? Just continue meddling in shit.
I'm glad for the dev that I'm in home office... :@
TLDR: Dev changed const value without thinking, ignoring test failures and I had the fun of debunking for 2 days a mysterious HAProxy failure due to HTTP header validation... -
Debugging is fun sometimes.
Especially when said bug fills up RAM, sends a bunch of guff to VRAM, and pins a core at 100%, rendering my computer near unusable in mere seconds.
(I accidentally load the same texture maybe a hundred or so times) -
Do you guys remember the fun little joke utility called fuck that corrected typos?
While debugging an absurd 2s shell load time, I noticed today that the command it appends to .bashrc to _set a fucking alias_ takes almost 400ms to execute.1 -
Good one 😅,
Indeed #Debugging isn't always that much fun, but I have learned a lot by debugging the code and still learning so many things. It helps us become better.
Agree?
1 -
Isn't it fun when you are given a library or framework and that in order to debug it you have to use some hacky way of hooking the code to a special instance of the project?
Even more fun: the developers by default don't debug the project with tools, but rather with logic. Ok, that's a good way to debug but it shouldn't be the only way to debug. I don't want to go back to the age of coding on paper. At least give me a stacktrace that's halfway clear on what's happening there. Even worse is when the framework doesn't document its own problems! stacktrace.someMagicalMethodNoOneKnowsWhatItDoes(). Having to read the even more mystic and overly verbose documentation! You're just left there trying and guessing shit, even for the senior devs!
And do you know what's more fucked up?! Fucking using println() to debug!! And they take this shit seriously! I don't understand how these people call themselves programmers. No breakpoints? What the fuck, man!
Just give me Visual Studio for fuck's sake. I don't want to code in a broken IDE with a broken framework. Development on its own is already hard enough, so don't make it harder by giving me crappy frameworks and crappy IDE's that only work half the time.
Debugging without a debugger, with broken IDE's, with broken frameworks, I'm sorry but that's just not for me. And then the framework dares advertise that it 'lets the developer focus on business code!' (how many times have you heard this crap before?). Right, the only thing I focus on constantly is trying to figure out why their broken framework doesn't work.
Arghhh. -
Debugging is a must have skill for every developer. I used to consider debugging to be a pain. But when I did it for fun it made debugging a bit easier to me.
Take debugging as a challenge and enjoy doing it, it will make your life a lot easier
1 -
A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..
If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..
From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!
Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!
There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..
If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..
Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */
Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!
And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..
One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..
Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.
So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..
And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.
To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it4 -
This is just me throwing out my thoughts from the past few weeks.
edit: this is long
> Working on a C# project. its going well Its teaching me a lot about SQLite and file IO. I'm having a lot of fun with it, even the debugging as much I want to slam my head on the wall but I'm not asking for help so far and I'm very proud of myself because it feels so much better. like I don't mind asking for help but its so much more rewarding and I learn more from it.
> I need portfolio of software I can show off to employers and the current project I'm working on is the first programs in the portfolio. The place I want to apply to uses C#, but I still wanted a few other programs in other languages such as Python or JS just to show what I'm capable of.
> I was looking at what ASP.NET Core offers and it impresses the fuck out of me, and confuses me. The parts that confuse me, like for example the normal asp webapp is a very impressive hello world app. and it has so many different files and such but how or what do they expect me to add? how am I supposed to work with it? and if I delete any files I don't need (the premade js, bootstrap, jquery, html, and css) it produces errors because of the project files are pointing to those. and i know I can use the empty project (I do) but does that question my ability as a dev since I don't want to use it for my projects?
> On that note I love using Intellisense and debuggers and auto complete and I can go without them I just don't want to rely on them. idk I've just been a little more stressed these past few weeks.4 -
How do you guys explain to your CEO, PM, boss [whatever] that you cannot give them accurate time estimates for debugging? 😅
If something i made has a bug, and uses external libraries, not even debugging my code (more like, how i used / implemented something has a problem), i obviously have to first of all check what the hell is wrong ! I dont just make bugs for fun and happen to know exactly what is the problem and therefore the solution ... -
I miss bug hunting... Baking new features is far less fun than debugging all sorts of weird issues across all the layers of the setup. Devops has its charm, but still I find myself looking for problems more often than tinkering with devtools.
I wish there was a "debugger" role in my company.7 -
You know what's more fun than debugging a SQL stored prodecure?
Debugging a SP which CATCHes all errors and instead returns an error code. Because exceptions are scary... -
[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.
Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.
People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.
People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).
I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.
THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.
But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.
Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.
They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.
Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.
This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).
We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.
People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.
And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.
There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.
I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.
It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.
Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job11 -
i got a dev!rant nostress ball, because i didn't have any serious rants and used the app for fun purposes.
edit: do you think maybe it can also help in debugging, although it's nothing close to being a duck.
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Just finished a hackathon this past week trying to hone my skills in node. However, the amount of time I spent debugging stupid type errors was...quite miserable to say the least. Because of that, I’m looking for a new web library or framework XD. Anyone have some fun alternatives with languages that are preferably strongly typed?2
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Wanted to add a simple log entry when a model changes state in a certain way.
Unit tests pass, functional tests pass, manual tests through application GUI pass.
But for some fucking reason the single line logging call I added results in an error 500 when the application is accessed through a REST API.
Going to have a fun day tomorrow debugging this shit. -
I needed to migrate one DB to another with one sql suite but instead I fucked up and suddenly disconnected both DBs, without being able to reconnect them again
I waisted a whole day for debugging, but found nothing
And guess which magic fixed all issues? On and Off a service of an app
On and Off!!!
The fun thing is that restarting the server didn't help, but the only service helped1 -
In the morning to afternoon i do coding, debugging and sometimes deploying. In the night i just already start to play PUBG. I dont know why i am interested to play this game at the time.
But what i’ve learned while playing it is like looting the weapon and amno, find the easiest enemiest first (bot is still existed in the real game) , make some rotation, call the teammate if i am being knockdown and unluckly we landed then dead without weapon (too-soon) and fight for getting Winner Winner Chicken Dinner !!
Its like what i am doing every single day tobe better as developer, find some literature or articel, try to solve an easiest task, deploy it and boom its getting error and suddenly need to hotfix after it’s work with return 200 expected and no error logs on my APM😅
If you guys play too, share me your pubg id on the comment below.
Lets make some fun party ✌️👍 -
I am currently playing dumb with a potential hire and it's just so much fun I don't know if I should stop.
We gave the dev a little coding challenge to code a small expense tracking app. Nothing fancy, just to see how he well he could do on his own. We told him to take as much time as he requires.
He submitted it and I tried to run it. It worked alright but I could not register or login.
I debugged the issue with him for a while and told him I would look at it later since I am tied up with other tasks..
We are communicating via an IM.
Him: Or how did you run the project. I wish I was there to run it for you. Lol
Me: dotnet run. start without debugging
Him: From the cmd?
At this point I about to get pissed. Where else would I run 'dotnet run' from??
Me: I would hope so
Him: I always run it from the cmd. With administrative privileges
Me: Really?? Where can I find cmd?
Him: Yes. Do you use a Mac?
Me: nope. I am using windows2 -
since my favourite phone automation app llama is no more i discovered automate. you build your 'scripts' with functional blocks. it's quite fun but debugging is messy.
mildly interesting: implementing a guided setup instead of defining the values directly leaves me with 77% setup and ui vs 23% actual task.1
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