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Yesterday was Friday the 13th, so here is a list of my worst dev nightmares without order of significance:
1) Dealing with multithreaded code, especially on Android
2) Javascript callback hell
3) Dependency hell, especially in Python
4) Segfaults
5) Memory Leaks
6) git conflicts
7) Crazy regexes and string manipulations
8) css. Fuck css.
9) not knowing jack shit about something but expected by others to
produce a result with it.
10) 3+ hours of debugging with no success
Post yours27 -
That awkward moment, when you after several hours of debugging finds the error, types git blame and your own name comes up.3
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Fuck you stupid cunt!!!! If your fucking project depends on empty folder structure just put a fucking gitignore file on it so I don't have to waste all fucking day debugging your tasteless spaghetti to figure out that you download files to an empty folder that git clone doesn't create.3
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I had a coworker that was a real asshole. I noticed that often, during git merges, he removed part of the code I wrote.
So I had to spend a lot of time copying and pasting my code from git history in order to restore it.
I complained about that but he answered it happened by mistake. In reality that happened so often that he had to done it deliberately.
Btw, I did a little revenge. One day I discovered he didn't feel very comfortable using recursion. Thereafter, every time I needed a small loop I created a recursive function doing the same thing.
Fortunately, after some months I found a better job. I hope he is still debugging that code.4 -
When your team member does a “git checkout .” instead of “git add .” after an intense session of debugging..
..😊16 -
I practice what I call "Aggressive Oriented Programming" or AOP.
Whenever I'm investigating a bad bug, working on a project that I really hate, or dealing with messy code written by a messy developer, I often find myself resorting to an [internal] state of violence.
It's not like I scream and smash my screen (although sometimes I want to). It usually consists of a few git blames and some curse words in print statements for debugging. This is just my way to vent.
5 -
Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.
Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.
I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?
P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.
Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.
That's why I'm so frustrated.
I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)13 -
1) Read the wiki on git. I probably have enough shorthands and test methods that you won't need much other shit to debug issues.
2) when debugging, remember that if it is there, there's a good reason why I put it there.
3) commented-out code is probably useful for maintenance. I left it there for a good reason. 😛
4) chances are whatever I wrote, was the state of the art at the time I wrote it. There might be better ways to do it now tho.
5) I always work modular. First, understand the structure. (probably also documented on wiki) DO NOT fuck up the structure. If you change it, you document it.
6) If you feel I wrote shit, it's probably because management annoyed the living shit out of me. Pun intended.
7) Your confusion is normal. I don't do dumb shit.4 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
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One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
My .pryrc and a Ruby script it loaded (in another directory) both disappeared seemingly without cause. I lost days of work including a bunch of debugging and performance utilities I wrote over the past year.
But I have no clue how this happened. Neither the .pryrc file nor the script’s folder are tracked by git, so it wouldn’t have been deleted, overwritten, stashed and dropped, etc. None of the other dot files are missing, and the folder is still present, albeit with one fewer files. I wouldn’t delete them, and commands that would delete them do not appear in my zsh history. So I’m at a loss. Figuratively and literally.
They’re just. Gone.
Is there any way to recover missing files on OSX?
I never thought I’d need a backup solution for local scripts.9 -
A dev life in Queen songs:
„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim4 -
Those moments when you get up hoping that you don't screw up your day but then end up bugging your code rather than debugging it and then Git/other VCS comes to your help.2
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Always remember to "git submodule update", I spent ages debugging a build today because the build system's submodule directory was empty.
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I was messing around with global git precommit hooks.
Then I went on a holiday for a month, and forgot all about those hooks.
I came back, and then spent 2 days debugging why "git was behaving weirdly". I seriously started questioning whether I had ever even understood git at all. Turns out some moron (me) left some half-baked scripts lying around.
I'm such an idiot -
After a massive refactoring of the DAO test aren't running after 6 hours of debugging and traceing I find what some "genius" left behind.He wrote direct database updates from the UI code. WTF? Who gave them git access?
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My favorite tools include:
Source tree(git life saver)
Stickies on my dock(I can randomly put any shit on it and keep it for months)
Android studio(love shorcuts except gradle)
My moto x smartphone (helps me in debugging) -
Currently debugging a project that was written over 4 years ago...
At first all was well in the world, besides the ever present issue off our goddamn legacy framework. This framework was written 7 years ago on top of an existing open source one, because the existing one was 'lacking some features' & 'did not feel right'.
Now those might be perfectly fine reasons to write a layer on top of a framework, but please, for all future devs sanities, write fucking documentation and maintain it if you're going to use said framework in all major projects!!
Anyhow back to the situation at hand, I'm getting familiar with the project, sighing at the use of our stupid legacy framework, attempting to recreate the reported bugs...
Turns out I can't, well I get other bugs & errors, but not the reported ones. I go to the production server, where I suddenly do can reproduce them...
Already thinking, fuck my life, and scared for the results... I try a 'git status' on the production server....
And yep, there it is, lo and behold, fucking changes on production, that are not in git, fuck you previous dev who worked on this and your stupid lazy ass modifcations on production!
Bleh, already feeling royally pissed, there's only 1 thing I can do, push changes back to git in a seperate branch, and pray I can merge them back in master on my dev environment without to much issues...
Only I first have to get our sysadmi. to allow pushing from a production server back to our git server...
Sigh, going to put on my headphones, retreat to my me space and try to sort out this shitpile now... -
Today I spent almost a full hour after office hours debugging my code for an issue only to realise that the local process responsible for live reloading my code did not pick up changes after git branch switch.
So in retrospect, if I had left the bug for the day it would have automatically got fixed tomorrow once my laptop restarted.
But no...I just had to figure out the issue on my own today which wasted a complete hour and I won't get it back 🤦🏽♂️ -
Power BI: wonderful tool, pretty graphics, and can do a lot of powerful stuff.
But it’s also quite frustrating when you want to do advanced things, as it’s such a closed platform.
* No way to run powerquery scripts in a command line
* Unit testing is a major pain, and doesn’t really test all the data munging capabilities
* The various layers (offline/online, visualisation, DAX, Powerquery, Dataset, Dataflow) are a bit too seamless: locating where an issue is happening when debugging can be pain, especially as filtering works differently in Query Editing mode than Query Visualisation mode.
And my number 1 pet peeve:
* No version control
It’s seriously disconcerting to go back to a no version control system, especially as you need to modify “live code” sometimes in order to debug a visual.
At best, I’ve been looking into extracting the code from the file, and then checking that into git, but it’s still a one-way street that means a lot of copying and pasting back into the program in order to roll back, and makes forking quite difficult.
It’s rewarding to work with the system, but these frustrations can really get to me sometimes2 -
!rant
Often times while working/debugging I get to a state where the app/whatever works but then I realize that it didn't, so some more changes and I get to a new state.
Question is, does there exist something which lets me switch between these states without messing up my git? I do have a solution in mind but want to know if it already exists.16
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