Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Got this from a recruiter:
We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA
Hiring Mode: Contract
Must have skills:
· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills
My response:
I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.
1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore
Please delete me from your emailing list.49 -
Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*
We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:
- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings
Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!
*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*
Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason
*audience: ooooohhhhh*
You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.
*audience: laughs*
Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.
Backstory:
We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!
... oh to have a time machine
Working with C:
- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.
- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".
- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.
- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.
- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.
- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.
- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.
... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.
- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:
Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"
... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?
- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.
- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).
- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.
- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.
- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.
- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?
You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.
I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.
Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex20 -
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:
Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.
What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others
Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban
Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)
Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?
These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄9 -
(!Rant) My Programming cave.
A clean environment has always been one of my 'must have' tools for development.
Keeping it clean keeps you calm while busting down on some difficult problems.
And you better believe late night programming marathons are a treat.
23 -
0. Plan before you code. Document everything. You won't remember either your idea or those clever implementations next week (or next month, or next year...).
1. Don't hack your way through, unless that's what you intend to do. Name your variables, functions etc. neatly: autocomplete exists!
Protip: Sometimes you want to check a quick language feature or a piece of code from one of your modules. Resist the urge to quickly hack in the test into your actual project. Maintain a separate file where you can quickly type in and check what you're looking for without hacking on your project (For example, in Python, you can open a new terminal or IDLE window for those quick tests).
2. Keep a quiet environment where you can focus. Recommend listening to something while coding (my latest fad is on asoftmurmur.com). Don't let anything distract you and throw your contextual awareness out of whack.
3. Rubber ducks work. Really. Talking out a complex piece of logic, or that regex or SQL query aids your mind greatly in grasping the concept and clearing the idea. Bounce off code and ideas with a friend or colleague to catch errors and oversights faster. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4. Since everyone else is saying this (and because it merits saying), USE VERSION CONTROL. Singular most important thing to software development aside from planning and documenting.
5. Remember to flout all of the above once in a while and just make a mess of a project where you have fun throwing everything around all over the place. You'll make mistakes that you never thought were possible by someone of your caliber :) That's how you learn.
Have fun, keep learning!3 -
When I was in the army I wasn't officially a dev. But one commander needed someone to develop a bunch of stuff and couldn't get a dev officially, so I ended up as his "assistant", which was an awesome job with about 60% time spent on software development.
Except I wasn't an official developer, so I wasn't afforded many of the privileges developers get, like a slightly more powerful machine, a copy of Visual Studio, or an internet connection. In this environment you couldn't even download files and transfer the to your computer without a long process, and I couldn't get development tools past that process anyway.
So I was stuck with whatever dev tools I had pre-installed with Windows. Thankfully, I had the brand new Windows XP, so I had the .Net framework installed, which comes with the command line compiler csc. I got to work with notepad and csc; my first order of business: write an editor that could open multiple files, and press F5 to compile and run my project.
Being a noob at the time, with almost no actual experience, and nobody supervising my work, I had a few brilliant ideas. For example, I one day realized I could map properties of an object to a field in a database table, and thus wrote a rudimentary OR/M. My database, I didn't mention, was Access, because that didn't need installation. I connected to it properly via ADO.NET, at least.
The most surprising thing though, in retrospect, is the stuff I wrote actually worked.14 -
"Coding is solving puzzles".
I think everyone has heard that platitude. But it's not exactly right.
So I grew up in a very poor environment, a moldy building full of jobless addicts.
And in my town there was this shop where super poor parents could take their kids to borrow free toys and stuff.
So as a kid I remember being frustrated by these second hand jigsaw puzzles, because there were always a few pieces which had been teared up or chewed on, or were even completely missing.
That is what development is.
You pull in this seemingly awesome composer package, and that one super useful method is declared private, so you need to fork the whole thing.
Your coworker has built this great microservice in python, but instead of returning 404 not found, it returns 200 with json key/value saying "error": "not found".
There's a shitload of nicely designed templates for the company website, but half of them have container divs inside the components, the other half expect to be wrapped in container divs when included.
You're solving puzzles, but your peers are all brainless jigsaw-piece-chewers. They tried to mend a problem, but half way through got distracted, hungry and angry, started drooling over the task and used a hammer to fit in the remaining stuff.11 -
Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.
About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.
During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...
I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.
I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.
I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.
I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.
Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.
After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.
It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!6 -
[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]
Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.
That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.
If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!6 -
Manager: Everyone will be required to switch to Mac in the next couple of months.
Dev: Um, why?
Manager: Macs are more professional and developer focused than windows machines, I read it in an article. Plus they look way nicer.
Dev: Half of the applications we use don’t have a version that works on iOS.
Manager: What? How do you know?
Dev: I have a Mac for occasionally doing some work on the iOS app we support. I ran into that when I was setting it up as a development environment.
Manager: You have a Mac?
Dev: Yes
Manager: Why? How come you don’t use it for development?
Dev: …15 -
!rant but a story
This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me
junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"
We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.
Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:
junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."
*junkfellow suddenly look confused*
my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"
junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!
my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk
junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D11 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
Continued…
The company that I’m working for has done lots of subtle racist things surrounding diversity policy. There was a major blowout between execs and suddenly all went quiet. The guy that was hired against my recommendation was gone. Until early January when he showed up at our building to raid our kitchen. WTF. It turns out HR decided to move him to the other office and out of sight so my team wouldn’t see him. He isn’t working on a project and is getting paid on the bench for more than the 100% billable devs.
After I saw him bumming around, I replied to a recruiter that has been trying to recruit me to their company.
The position pays 25% more 😲 and comes with a an amazingly relaxed development environment. Developer time is managed and allocated by someone in a dedicated role. 80% of the time is sprint work and the rest is self-driven projects or learning. Teams are stable, mostly local, and there is very low turnover. Developers get Mac or Linux computers.
I’m doing an executive meet and greet at the other company tomorrow. They will be the ones that will make me the final offer. I feel pretty good about it too because they will let me sign up to start in a month and a half so I can give a long notice, work until the end, and my current company can hire me back as a consultant in a pinch. It softens the blow for my current company and it makes it easy for me.
Worst case scenario I don’t take the position but use it for leverage. Who am I kidding? I’ll definitely jump ship when negotiation is done tomorrow.
https://devrant.com/rants/2338969/...7 -
Hello Programmers and Designers! Stop assuming everyone in the development environment uses MacBook or Apple products. I Love my Windows and Android devices!!!
35 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
Most satisfying bug I've fixed?
Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.
After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.
After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."
Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.
The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.
My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..
public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}
I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.
The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..
DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"
Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.5 -
So I've decided to try and switch my complete development environment to Ubuntu from Windows. I've used Ubuntu before but just for general use. Excited :D
Any essentials or anything to get?
33 -
*Opens some Computerphile video on YouTube in Chrome Canary*
CPU > hey ho dude, wait a minute..! I can't process all of this in realtime!!! >_<
Alright.. I think I've still got a copy of all their videos sitting somewhere in the file server.. perhaps I could use that instead.
*Opens said video from the file server in SMPlayer*
CPU > aah, thanks man. Now I can allocate 15-ish % of my resources to that and give you a good watching experience.
Web browsers are really great for being the most general-purpose document viewers, application execution environments (remote code execution engines as someone here called it), and overall be one of the most versatile programs on any PC's standard software suite.
But that comes at a price.. performance. And definitely when it comes to featureful fucking WordPress shitsites (shites?), bloated YouTube, Google, Facebook, and all that fucking garbage.. I fucking hate web browsers and this "Web 2.0" that people keep on talking about. Your boatload of JavaScript frameworks just to ease your own fucking development has a real impact when it happens on dozens of tabs, you know.
Besides, can't those framework creators just make it into a "compiler" * of sorts? So that front-end devs can flail their dicks in an shit-infested environment full of libraries and frameworks all they want, but the framework can convert it into plain JS code that the web server can then serve. Or better yet, the JavaScript standard could be improved to actually be usable on its own!
Look, I'm not a front-end dev. Heck, I'm not even a dev to begin with. But what I do know is that efficiency matters, especially at large scale. Web browsers being so overgeneralized and web devs adding a boatload of fucking libraries or frameworks or whatever, it adds up, both to the CPU's and my own temper.
(*) Quote marks because source code to source code isn't really compiling, but then uglified JS looks worse than machine code anyway so meh :/6 -
Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.
Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.
Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.
If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.
Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn3 -
Job title :
"PHP and MySQL Programmer"
Job description :
"We are looking for a Flash Developer with a high level of proficiency developing ActionScript solutions.... bla bla Development in a 2D and 3D environment"
doesnt say ANYWHERE what is require to know in php nor mysql
EDIT: actually it does but why would they put php and mysql programmer if thats not the main things they are looking for6 -
hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?
well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.
the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...4 -
Me a while ago talking to a recruiter over the phone. This was for a C++ dev position.
(R)ecruiter : So except for the development things, we are looking for someone who has experience configuration linux. Do you have any experience with that?
(M)e : Sure, I use Linux all the time. What do you mean.
R : Well, Just using Linux isn't enough for this position, you need to have experience in configuration Linux.
M : Well. I can't answer your question if you don't specify what you mean. Do you mean that I need to be able to install my own packages? Set up my dev environment? Bash scripting? Being able to configure my bash profile to have good aliases? Use Linux to develop software? Because I can do all of these.
M : Or do you need someone who can write Kernel modules for the OS, because I don't have any experience in that but would like to learn.
R : Oh, I don't really know what it means. But the paper says that you need to have experience configuration Linux. So what would you say your experience with that is?
Me internally : JESUS CHRIST I JUST TOLD YOU WHAT I KNOW AND WHAT I DON'T KNOW HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ASSESS ME CORRECTLY.
Me 😎 : I use Arch and you have to set it up completely from the ground by your self so I know everything there is to know.
Basically every question was like this with the recruiter. I got further in the process but quit because the workplace looked like it would drain my soul when I got interviewed by the employees of the company.
Jesus Christ though, some recruiters could be replaced by an automated phone system.17 -
I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉4 -
Studying Multimedia Arts, we are required to take a couple of courses in basic web development. (PHP). Since its known as new media grrr 🙄
Coming from a webdev background, I have no problem understanding PHP. However other designers in my course do.
A friend messaged me asking me how to fix a problem while in the dev environment. She tried explaining her problem without any of the terms we use in our general communication. You can read the conversation below.
14 -
If your application cannot fully function in a development environment, with the excuse that certain functionalities can only be executed in production, the reason is that your system is a huge piece of shit.5
-
While setting up a very complex development environment I asked my colleges, why are certain configuration steps needed. They replied only "Just do it!". I see, that they may be Nike fans or deeply inspired by the Shia LaBeouf motivation speech, but I still feel like:
2 -
Just started my new job.
Poorly defined requirements ✅
Expecting things to be done yesterday ✅
Poorly managed teams ✅
Terrible legacy code ✅
Half the development team is offshore ✅
Maybe I’m just selfish, but I need to work in an environment that has the following
A good technology stack.
A competent manager/team leader.
Competent colleagues.
Clearly defined documentation.
A proper onboarding process.
Why is this so difficult to find in organisations?12 -
The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.
A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.
Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.
Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.
The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.
But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.
Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!13 -
Development plus laboratories is kind of my expertise, so I ended up in a little grimey HR office looking out over the factory floor of a cocoa processing facility. I was applying for an automation job, a temp thing for three weeks, updating some ugly scripts which took readings from machines and threw them into excel sheets.
"We don't think a developer like you has enough experience working in an environment like this. Safety and working in sterile conditions is very important to us"
I had sent them my certifications in advance, plus references to the work I did in a biosafety level 3 lab for JnJ and cleanroom work at an aerospace company.
There were fat sweaty guys on sneakers, taking cocoa paste samples right next to the window.
They ended up hiring a friend of mine with zero experience, for minimum wage.
Just be fucking honest, don't waste my time with courtesies and lies. If they had just told me about the low salary indication, I would still have done the work. I was in between jobs anyway, bored, trying to fill up some spare time.4 -
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
Imagine this clusterfuck:
A small company creates its own CMS on PHP 5.5 and MySQL, coded by fresh junior devs who apparently just got into coding.
My new employer sadly is one of their customers and now I got the task to migrate a group of tightly linked websites on subdomains to an actually sane and maintainable CMS...
Fuck me...
Apparently the continuous extension of the websites over the years got so labor intense, that the mentioned company lacks the manpower to fulfill further development wishes.
I've looked into the code today... let me tell you, PTSD is helluva thing.
- Each subdomain has a complete copy of the Crap Management System, there is no use of composer packages and each of the 50 folders in the webroot contains a mix of source code and images or other resources.
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests.
- There is no central file for environment variables like a ".env".
- Each website uses at least 5 different versions of jQuery, of which some jquery.min.js files were manually modified.
Don't get me started on how the DB is organized...
My work on this has just started, there will be more I've yet to uncover.
"C'mon, man! Gimme a break!"15 -
I switched to using Ubuntu as my primary development environment about a month ago from Windows and I couldn't be happier! The initial setup was a pain in the neck (esp. display scaling issues, which Windows 10 is much better at than Ubuntu), but now that it's all set up, I'm lovin' it!6
-
Completed Angular 2 course on codeschool, really liked improvements and simplicity of Angular over Angularjs. Decided to do quick start guide in official website. Oh my f**king god... I need to setup webpack, typescript linter, typings, polyfills etc angular2-cli is no better, crawling with errors... why... why can't one just start a project and work instead spending loads of timing configuring all of that... AND WHY WE CANT HAVE PROPER SUPPORT FOR LATEST FEATURES...
I don't even know what I am ranting about... I just wish to spend more time creating things than configuring for ages development environment.7 -
Sometimes I feel like my job is just babysitting my coworkers. I need to find a way to teach them how to think for themselves.
I'm not a senior dev but I am the one my coworkers turn to for help. I like helping (even if it's annoying some times), so I'm thinking about embracing the mentor role in my team. My plan for now is to stop giving the answers right away (which I usually do to get back to my work) and instead try to guide my coworkers into figuring out the issue themselves. This will take more of my time of course and will require I practice my patience in a possibly stressful environment (depending on how close deadlines are), but I'm hoping that it'll produce better coworkers (one can dream, at least).
Do any of you know of any good reading resources about mentoring or becoming a mentor, specifically in tech/development?7 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
Interviewer: Why do you use Linux distribution for your development environment?
Me: Because I want to make my life as difficult as possible1 -
So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.5 -
Windows 10 as a development environment... Oh freakin' goody.
📍Multi-montor is finicky
📍Text scaling is still horribly broken
📍It takes longer to resume from standby than my old laptop takes to boot up from a cold start
📍Color matching LCD monitors is pants-on-head retarded
📍32GB of RAM isn't going to be enough...
This is going to be a long summer in corporate land.20 -
Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:
Me:
Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files
Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software
Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP
IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files
Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp
Network: No internet access, internal company network only
Web browser: IE 6
Graphical design software: msPaint
Version control: Emails
Team communication: Emails
Software distribution vector: Emails
Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers
Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.11 -
Just made the shift to a Linux development environment from a windows one... Gotta say it feels so much better (love Ubuntu's interface)
Miss the use of photoshop though (I Know gimp exists... But photoshop is just so much better)
Any tips for a linux/ubuntu newbie??36 -
While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.
I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.
The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.
Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.
Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.
This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.
What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.8 -
I'm so conflicted! My brother just opened VS Code and tried evangelizing me on the benefits of using a light theme! Should I disown him? Secretly sabotage his development environment? This is very distressing. Suggestions? Lol14
-
Christmas reminds me of my favourite development team ever. I first visited the team for a quick hello, before I started working with them, at Christmas time. Unlike the rest of the the company they had decorations and Christmas treats and the radio was on with Christmas songs. This set a very good impression.
When I did come to join them after the holidays I discovered that this team like having treats, would often sing songs together randomly and even make up new ones about their code on the spot. They had a great attitude to work and made the working environment a fun place to be. We did get lots done but I also learned so much being with them. When I left they wrote me a card filled with raps they had come up with reflecting my time with them. I still have that card.
I miss you guys dearly. Merry Christmas xxx -
I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.
Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).
(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)
1.4 hours after regular work hours:
Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.
.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.
Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.
Me: [ugh] okay
.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.
Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?
Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.
Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.
Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...
Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.
Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.
Logged off.
I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.35 -
I have worked with a handful of very green devs in the last 10 years. A common theme has emerged.
They don't heed any of my advice.
An exercise to the reader:
If you have a Windows machine, but need to work in a Linux environment, what would be your first instinct how to proceed?
In this exercise, you are as green as it gets. You have very little professional development experience, let alone server admin experience. And your lead dev has suggested setting up a VM.
1. Set up a Linux VM
2. Use a live CD or set up a dual boot system
3. Pay for a cloud server and set it up from scratch
I have no idea how this person intends to get any work done on a remote, terminal only, Linux server. That is if I can even get their environment into a sane configuration.15 -
how to learn web development in 2018:
- watch youtube video of that new shiny promising framework
- spend hours trying to set up development environment
- spend another hours waiting for the dependencies to install
- spend the next few hours wondering and googling why it wont work even at fresh install
- spend another few hours redoing everything just to make sure you haven't missed a step
- realize that the youtube video you watched is uploaded last week, and now the framework developers mysteriously decided to change literally everything
- spend hours looking for another youtube video until you realize that now you are watching completely unrelated youtube video
- spend next hours wondering how your life become this pathetic while overthinking all of your past mistakes, and now you are just this lonely pathetic person with no clear future and that you will spend the rest of your life working at a fastfood chain below the minimum wage with no social life living on your parent's basement.9 -
Worst dev experience was when I was asked to "take a look at" a propriatery Windows app built by a now non-existent team at the company.
The code base resembled the quality of legacy code where about every hour I felt like I needed to vomit. But that wasn't even the worst part for me.
This was the first time I had to develop on Windows and was sent a separate dedicated laptop for this. Now I started to have a bad feeling about this because as far as I had known every single dev at the company used company Macs for development (including me for other projects). It turned out the Windows laptop was indeed configured for a non-dev team :)
Having liased with IT admins for a day I finally got my environment set up and hit install on the dependencies and in 10 minutes it got to less than 10%. The laptop was pretty powerful so I couldn't belive wtf was going on, fans were ramping. Checked task manager and the company Anti-Malware was hogging the whole CPU.
I was so mad that I managed to get the IT admins to completely disable it and then it was only the pain of working with shitty code on Windows which would have been more than enough from the start. Thankfully it only lasted a week. -
Goddamn, why is Android SDK setup such a stupendous pain in the ass?
"Wah wah, can't find JDK!"
Wtf are you talking about you stupid fuck, JDK is right there, all IDEs find it, environment vars are set, it is the right version and is used on this machine for a billion development purposes! Stop being a useless cunt!
And this is everytime. Had to setup up Android SDK four or five times by now on different machines and it has NEVER gone smoothly. There is always a plethora of different issues and you end up wasting all day going through fucking dependency hell!
Read a book on ergonomics, you colossal android fucks. Just because you got JetBrains behind your IDE and they actually know what they are doing, doesn't make your setup process any less of a braindead nightmare.
Fucking hell.6 -
Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.
Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.
For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.
I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"
Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"
And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.
the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.
Plus, you learn more when you teach others.16 -
Don't you just love it when something works in your development environment, your staging environment and then randomly breaks on production? :^)6
-
Client: Each invoice should be it's entity. It should only report it's own open amount. Any other open amounts remain on the other invoices.
Me: No problem. ::Sets invoices to only report own open amount::
PM: Hey, the invoices in UAT are not displaying the sum of all open bills.
Me: I know. The client wants each invoice to only report the open amount on that specific invoice.
PM: That can't be right, change it back before we give the client access to the UAT environment.
Me: No problem. ::reverts invoice changes::
Client: We are failing the invoices. The invoices should not be giving total open amounts for the account. Each invoice should only report the open amount for that invoice. We told the development about this...
PM: I see. I'll make sure he understands your request.
Me: ... ::reverts the revert::
PM: Hey, the invoices in UAT aren't giving a total of the open-
Me: OMFG. I just want this task closed!
Client: After the invoice work is done, we need to talk about past due amounts and how they are reported to customers.
PM: Sure thing. It is logical to give a total of a past due amount to the customer...
Me: ::Starts updating resume:: -
Motherfuck! God I hate xcode worst development environment ever conceived! Have to update it right now to be able to push to my device. Fucking appstore is the worst program ever. How about telling your users what the fuck is going on instead of just sitting there displaying a flash load circle. Gaaaaaahhh I wanted to go home 2 hours ago. Fuck you apple and all you stand for may you rot in the deepest crevices of he'll for all eternity! Fuuuuuck7
-
> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(
THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN! -
love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.
I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.
But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.
But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.
So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.
I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).
But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.
Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.
Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.8 -
"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.
Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.
During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.
I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.
It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.
I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.
After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.
We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.
I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.
I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.
I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.
I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.
I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.
This is what burnout looks like.20 -
So.....Google Flutter is finally out of beta and ready to go.
Why? Well you see, Google realized that Android development was a complete fucking mess (50+ lines of code to get a permission? Yeah eatadick) and that Fb had it right with React Native which held a better model for building interfaces and manipulating said data. Dart as a language is very nice and for those comming from C#, Java and Js should not pose that much of a hassle.
I love Java, I really do, but Google took care of making Android Java development as tedious as fucking possible with the quirky Android API. Hopefully Flutter will make it better and hopefully Fushia will become a better OS.
Remember, language extensions or frameworks happen for 2 different reasons:
1 the community loves the environment and language enough that they make more cool stuff for it (Js, Ruby, Python etc, this phenomena happens in said ecosystems)
2 the environment is so severly flawed that people add libs to fix it (or extensions to the language if we ate talking about a language)
E.g Android Butterknife, okhttp etc.
I welcome our Dart overlords.10 -
OMG, more changes requested by a client for their website. Co-worker is wondering why they're doing these requests and is asking my boss if the design confirmation process has been skipped.
I'm a junior developer, and this is my only experience so far. I don't know shit how to deal with these stuff. I just wanna focus on development right now. Have a proper team to guide me. Be in an environment where I can get strong technical learning. I don't know how to deal with all these politics yet.
I wanna walk out but I can't. I can't be selfish to my wife and let her be the only source of income, seeing as she even has it worse and wants to get out of her workplace too. I've done it before, can't let it happen again.
Sorry for the drama. I gotta vent out.7 -
Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.
First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.
Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.
Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.
Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON
Ok no problem, done.
Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.
The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD
Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.
I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.
Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.
My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.
I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.
Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.
"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.
I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django
Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.
But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.
Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.
Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence2 -
So i just had an interesting conversation.
View source images in comments
So some background. I used to do a lot of Minecraft development and server configuration. And Minecraft being made of mostly 12-year-olds they really don't pay very well. So I moved on from Minecraft but someone reached out for me to do their configuration for their server. (this was about a month ago) and I quoted them 40/hr because that's what I charge for my web dev work. So he promptly declined and I thought that was that. But tonight he messaged me and found a 5 month old post saying how I was looking to do free development work in order to get experience. And here is how the converstion when.
(His name is "Candy")
Candy:
Lol
Trying to take advantage of me with your bullshit $40/hour claims
Which is outright laughable
https://mc-market.org/threads/...
”I am looking for a network to stay long-term with and help/see it grow into a bigger server. (I would expect pay later down the road if we work together on an ongoing basis)”
—
Quoting your MC-Market post.
What do you have to say for yourself? Trying to take advantage of people?
Going to say something else completely delusional or own up to the fact that you were trying to take advantage of me?
I already knew you were, but now I have the hard evidence.
As I am not a stupid person.
Not only did your friend lie, but you tried to take advantage of me, thinking I was stupid enough to fall for your $40/hour bullshit for basic configuration work. MineSaga charges $30.00 an hour on the high. Don’t even try to do the same shit you did to me to anyone else. It won’t work.
Me:I was interested in doing plugin development and learning so I offered my services for free so I could learn in a more real environment. I no longer do minecraft plugins rather I am a web developer and my rate is $40/hr I am good at configuration which is why i contacted you but I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work. Just like how you can higher a prostitute to wash your car but it would be cheaper to get the kid from around the block to do it. Also not sure what your end goal is here. I gave you my rate and you didn't agree with it. So you should just move on. Plus this is the minecraft world let me know when you get to the real world so you you can pay in big boy money.
Candy:
So your configuration work for minecraft is $40/h as well?
Lol
Absolutely hilarious.
Me:
did you not read my message?
"I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work."
Candy:
Who were your most recent clients?
Me:
i'm not going to give you that information
Candy:
Because you know you are lying to me with your crazy rates, and if you aren't, that means you have near to no clients.
Yet another lie.
Me:
keep telling yourself that buddy
Candy:
Lol
Good luck getting any more clients.
rip
Me:
?
I get more clients all the time
They just are not in your realm of your minecraft imagination where you can pay a developer 20$/hr
Candy:
I just strongly disagree with the fact that you are charging $40/hour for configurative work
xD
Me:
Okay
But why even contact me? Did you really think trying to "Call me out" was going to have me lower my rates or something.
Just get over it
Candy:
I haven't called you out and overcharging like that to others in the minecraft realm for a significant gain in money for work that is not worth nearly that amount is absolutely delusional.
I would recommend you stop making up false assumptions
Me: What ever you say
I left it at that. There was some more stuff but it was not that interesting so i left it out5 -
More like a sub company/department inside a company: Android.
I still use it as my main driver, but every time I try to get back into development with it(did it professionally for 2 years nearing on 3 and was a lead Android dev, mind you not necessarily by merit....) I end up hating everything about it.
The tooling is meh, the API is hideous and even with the addition of Kotlin, which I do find a nicer language over Java I still dislike it. The ammount of shit needed to make something as simple as store data, manage fragments, integrate with the NDK, make JSON API calls or even shake motions is just ludicrous and counter intuitive. I can see why people would hate Java based on Android, a language that I generally love and defend.
I firmly believe that people extend frameworks or tooling for 2 reasons only:
1 the stack is so awesome that you just want to create packages and libraries to extend the functionality of a powerful environment, like gems for Ruby, python packages, Node packages, php composer, nuget etc
2 the stack is so fucking hideous that people need to fix shit: the entire android square utility framework, butterknife, flutter, react native, codenameone, etc etc
The case with Android is the second. I have not met a professional Android developer that completely likes everything about Android, but will seldom find people that HATE other frameworks or environments.
Android it is for me. Still my daily driver and I love every Android phone I have ever owned. It just makes me feel lots of more compassion for fellow Android devs.4 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Just learned that yesterday someone suggested putting the dev team on "workspace", when I was on leave.
My first question, "what the hell is workspace?"
"It's a remote environment..."
Okay I get it. Are you kidding me? Doing development on remote desktop?
My second question, "Why the hell did someone suggest that?"
"We have had issues with devs using MySQL but the target prod will be using PostgreSQL. That caused issues, inconsistencies... And we found some issues after deployment."
Okay so much for DB agnostic. I called it out that everyone now install PostgreSQL on local. Problem solved, hopefully.
Why we had MySQL in the first place? Yes DB agnostic is one of the reason. The other being I'm more familiar with MySQL so it's quicker to perform tasks (like "can you clone that environment for me" and "can you fix the data on XYZ"). But that's trivial.
Just some ridiculous suggestion that set me off.7 -
How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:
First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.
So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.
This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…
So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.
He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.
A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅15 -
(Dev)Life in the past 12 hours
Oh boy have the last 12 hours been a roller coaster ride for me. Noob me decided to "compile" AoSP for my device to get a taste of how custom ROMs are built from source. Overall it was fun but the errors were a very good excercise for googling, SO. Couple stuff I learnt ( possibly useful for anyone who comes here )
* The shebang line ( #!/usr/bin/env python ) on my system translated to Python 3.7 environment instead of the expected Python 2.7. Best solution I think to avoid confusion is to create a python 2.7 environment and source it.
* Get your trees right. A jar file called WfdCommon.jar ( apparently known as wifi-display common ) was the cause of several hours of hunting the fault. My vendor tree somehow didn't have this file so dex2oat was borking out like mad. I'm still amazed how I figured this one out almost by myself. ( Basically I had to check every file included in the boot class path, and find the odd one )
* I wasted a lot of time in finding the right files to change version numbers and all. Maybe I didn't search XDA properly for a guide ?
Overall it was a fun experience. Also if anyone's experienced in this area could you share resources to learn more about custom ROM development? Specifically on the tweaking part where you mix features from different ROMs to make a great ROM ( like AoSP extended or Pixel Experience ). All I could find were on the zips and not on sources.
7 -
FUCKING FUCK ANGULAR!!!!
LIKE FUCK IT IN THE ARSE AND BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER WHILE LAUNCHING A MISSILE ON IT TO BE SURE!
(ﾉ≧∇≦)ﾉ ﾐ ┸━┸
So I am making something on angular and I got everything running in ng serve(development environment) , after handling all issues and showing it to my boss man he approves and asked to put it up on prod for a demo , doesn’t sound like an issue , I make the prod build on cli and BAM! 16 errors ? No issues right?, I’ll just google the issue. Googles.... there aren’t no clear solutions to it as the angular version keeps changing and nobody knows what broke it, I mean people have the issue,but like 100 reasons that can cause it,
HOLY LORD RELEASE A NEWER VERSION AFTER MENDING THE OLD ONE
But nooooooo!
Angular Dev:We fucked this one, lol what should we do boss man?
Angular boss man: lol just leave it, we need to build the new version with newer bugs,
P.S. I like angular, but it’s like a underdeveloped framework, too many issues and too many changes2 -
There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):
John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.
Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.
Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.
Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.
Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.
Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.
Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.
Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.
Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!9 -
I finally bit the bullet and got a 2018 macbook pro i7 with 1 terabyte ssd. I've been needing a personal laptop for development for awhile. I thought about going full Linux but it's tough finding Linux laptops that support thunderbolt 3 charging.
I tried to make Windows and WLS work. But it's a pain getting my Golang, GCP, and Kubernetes workflow setup on it. I keep having to jump command prompts and it annoys the shit out of me. Going multi monitor helps a lot, but I like to be at coffee shops and code.
I feel sick a out giving Apple more money especially $3,000. But it was money well spent. My workflow is seamless and unlike on my Windows laptop I dont spend 3 to 4 days just setting up my environment.15 -
I work in a consulting firm.
I started right after graduation. I entered with candy glasses. Thinking is all well and ready to climb the ladder.
I entered as a junior developer.
On my first project, i am constantly belittled by my team lead. To the extent i suffer from ptsd.
On my second project, i am the only dev. I am amaze i manage to handle all the development job by myself for a year. Still i get nasty comments from my boss. Despite i am able to deliver on time.
On my third project. i left due to office politics.
Currently i am in my fourth project. The code is complete mess. The development environment is crappy. It doesn't reflect change right away.
My passion has dried up.
I'm seriously giving thoughts, should i switch career path.12 -
I just have to rant...
7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.
A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)
Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.
It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.
And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”
I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.
Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏4 -
Love development
Like the people I work with including the boss
Okay with the salary I guess
Fucking hate the customers -
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
Windows 10 upgraded yesterday. Went to do a bit of work today, loads of stuff for my development environment wasn't working. The reason? The Windows 10 upgrade completely wiped my Users path and System path env variable.3
-
developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.
manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).
spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.
... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )
finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code
get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.
we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"
PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )
WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.
This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?
I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )
Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏11 -
So I just recently had the pleasure to set up a Rails environment for a friend on Windows. I haven't used Windows in about 5 or 6 years, and the person I had to set it up for doesn't know much about programming at all.
I all went fine at first, install database, devkit thingy and git. Then set up the project itself. And there is where the problems started.
First windows would refuse to use SSL, because of some weird bug in the Windows version of rubygems. The suggested upgrade did not work so I had to switch some gem sources to insecure connections, but at least it did install everything correctly.
Alright, I thought, that's not _that_ bad, everything is running now.
He sent me a screenshot some time later. Something was wrong with the JavaScript runtime, and I could not figure out for the life of me what the issue was.
Later again he sent me another screenshot.
His Antivirus spyware was messing with the asset pipeline. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
This was the point where I just said "FUCK IT, i'll just put everything into a fucking VM and let him use that".
I should have done that in the first place.
Long story short:
Setting up a development under Windows is painful.
Do yourself a favor and just use a VM.3 -
A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."
50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.2 -
I just felt like Google is the best player out there in terms of Companies.
Seriously, Well played Google.
This is not a negative opinion, I am just awe-struck at its tactics.
See, Google is currently the biggest name in terms of development in Android, ML and multi-platform software but no one can say it being a monopoly due to its dedication to open source community.
Recently Android emerged out to be One of the Biggest , most advanced, trusted and loved Technology . It saw great achievements, and up till 2016-17, it was at its peek. BUT when the market started shifting towards multi-platform boons and Ai, it got its hands into that too with its flutter and kotlin environment
One could have a negative opinion about this, But i can't seem to engulf the vast amounts of positive situations i see in this:
1) this IO18 (and many months before that) saw ML/AI being incorporated in Android (also the arcore, proje tango and many more attempts in the past) meaning that Android will not officially "die". It will just become an extremely encouraged platform( not just limited to mobiles) and a beginning of the robot -human reality ( a mobile is handling everything of your everyday life: chats, music apps sxhedules, alarms, and with an actively interacting ML, it won't be long when Android comes installed in a green bug lime droid robot serving you tea xD). Meanwhile the market of Windows games may shift to mobiles or typically " Android games" (remember, Android won't be limited to mobiles)
2)java may or may not die. The animations and smooth flow it seems to provide is always appreciated but kotlin seems to do so too. As for the hard-core apps, they are usually written in c++ .So java is in the red zone
3) kotlin-native and Flutter will be the weapons of future , for sure. they will be developing multi-platform softwares and will be dividing the market of softwares into platform specific softwares(having better ml/ai interactions,animations) and platform independent apps(access and use anywhere softwares).
And where does google stand?Its the lord varys of game of thrones which just supports and enhances the people in the realm. So it benefits the most . That's a company for you, ladies and gentlemen! If seen from common eyes they seem to be the best company ever and our 1 true king but it can also be a very thick fur cloak hiding their negetive policies and tactics , if any.
Well played, Google.16 -
Today the struggle was real.
But damn if it isn't days like this where you learn real shit.
Fighting with a debian VM for half the day to make a local development environment. I'm tired, but everything works, the project looks good, and I'm just sorta angry/tired/proud now.
I learned so much, and now want pie. I am going to go eat some pie.3 -
They've been in a meeting with some clients the whole morning.
12PM, time for me to go. Say Happy New Year and am on my way home.
12:20 Got home, took shirt off, got something to eat from the fridge.
12:22 Bit the first slice of pizza. Phone rings.
- "Yo' we wanted to show them app 2 but I can't log in."
+ "I left the laptop (and the whole dev environment) there, and there's no PC on in my house (and no dev environment whatsoever)."
- "Well check with your phone. [SIC] Tell me when you fix it."
12:32 I had turned my personal computer on; checked the problem was what I imagined (unpkg lib with no version defined on the link had a new major/non-retrocompatible version); grabbed an online FTP tool; remembered IP, user & password; edited the single line that caused the problem; and checked it worked. Calling back.
+ "It's fixed."
- "Thanks!"
12:38 CEO sent me an image of the app not working, due to a known bug.
+ "That happens if you try to access app 1 having accessed app 2 and not logging off." (app 2 isn't being used / sold, as it's still in development) "Try logging off and logging in again from app 1."
- * radio silence *
+ * guess they could get in *
They had the whole freaking morning. 😠
I'm the hero CMMi's level one warns you about. But at what cost.
Happy early New Year's Eve everyone.2 -
Treat software development like a trade. Because it is one.
Would you hire someone to build a shed for you if you needed to supply the hammer and saw and they needed to read a "How to Build Sheds" book to just get started? No, you wouldn't.
So why would you hire someone that doesn't have any kind of ready-to-go dev environment?
Why would you hire someone that doesn't understand the basics of this field?
Why do you expect employees to stop what they are doing and teach the new guy everything he should already know, or be able to figure out on his own based on his own experience?23 -
I dislike the damage web development tools have done to my programming habits.
The rapid feedback provided from the development environment (e.g. hot-reloads) encourages me to constantly bang out code with very little consideration for its side-effects.
This tendency has become a handicap when I write instructions for hardware with much less resources, such as a microcontroller.3 -
Hmm this website seems to redirect me to localhost... That's not helpful...
https://tersesystems.com/2013/11/...6 -
When you're developing it's very well advised to run your software locally in an environment as much as possible matching the real environment.
So for example, if you're running linux on production then you also run it locally to run your code.
Here's where people need to shut the fuck up:
No, mac is not good for linux development. Not unless portability is already a concern that you have and even then it might be counter productive. So many times when people say this, portability isn't not a concern. What runs on servers is up to them.
If your servers are going to be centos, then you develop with centos. Not with debian, gentoo, ubuntu, maxosx, etc.
Even different linux distros are a headache for portability when it's just to support a few desktops for development so don't think that macosx is going to cut it. It might not be as radical a difference as between windows and linux traditionally is but it's still not good for "linux" development. I don't think people making that statement really know what linux is now how different distributions work.
What you use for your graphical operating system doesn't matter to much but when you run your code then there's a simple solution.
Another thing people need to shut up about. It's not docker, unless you're already in Linux where docker is one of many options such as chroot or lxc.
This question always comes up, how do you developer for linux in windows? No it's not docker it's virtual machine.
It's that simple. You download the ISO for the distro you want and then install it on a VM. What does docker for windows do? It runs a linux VM that runs docker.
This may come as a great shock to developers around the world but it is possible to run linux in a VM and then any linux application your want including docker.
Another option is to shove a box in the corner, install what you need on it, share the file system and have people use that to run their code. It really is that easy.6 -
Development tools for embedded projects shouldn't need fucking internet to operate. Every fucking app needing internet to even startup is getting more and more stupid. I do a LOT of development offline. I usually have my dev machine away from internet for weeks at a time. It very nice to not have to deal with update issues and the like during this time. So naturally I choose tools to do offline programming for both desktop and embedded. So I decided that for my embedded work I wanted to have better environment than Arduino IDE. Now enters VSCode with Platform IO. I download all the target platforms for my boards. I get it all working and installed. Then I take my computer to my non internet location. I fire up VSCode, select the platform, create a test project, and compile the code. Everything is working great. Then I go to upload the code to my board:
"Blah blah blah you need internet first time talking to a board blah blah blah." Seriously? WTF? Who does stupid shit like this? Once you install your dev tools they should be fucking installed! Now I have to drag my fucking dev boards to another location and do a test install just to do fucking offline programming.
FUCK YOU PLATFORM IO!
Notice I don't blame VSCode for this. I know this IDE is very internet dependent, but it works once you get your plugins installed regardless of internet. Unless of course you are doing internet based programming.3 -
My brain: you have 30 min until you gotta catch the bus, that’s enough for that css fix you wanted to implement on the website!
My development environment: Hey that looks a lot better and works perfectly fine!
My website in production: Fuck you. Fuck your changes. Fuck your bus.
What do we learn? Precompile assets before pushing to production and don’t push to production if there’s a bus to catch 🙃 -
So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.
That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.
I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.
My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.
To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.
I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.
Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.
I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.
I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?
I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.
Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.5 -
1. i'm drunk.
2. please do me a sanity check
3:
this video, at this timestamp, watch the following about 5 minutes or so:
https://youtu.be/oG-6Ltp1_yE?t=1129
4. tell me (and possibly him in comment) if i'm wrong in the (point) of the following comment i wrote under that video:
20:53 ARE YOU FUCKIN KIDDING ME YOU ABSOLUTE MORON?!
yes, US has an altitude software written in fuckin VBA with an explicit statement to ignore errors, and there's not about 10x more automated testing code for a critical piece of functionality, than there is of the code that handles the actual functionality, and it's not been tested off-line (in simulated environment) as well as on-line (IRL) for at least years in all conditions, before it was deployed, YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING MORON.
CAN YOU JUST PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY STICK TO WHAT YOU ACTUALLY PROPERLY UNDERSTAND?!
HOLY FUCK THE LEVEL OF ARROGANCE IN YOU IN ASSUMING THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU KNOW VBA YOU KNOW HOW PROPER SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS DONE, HOLY FUCKING SHIT.
I've worked in companies of 1k employees and less, on absolutely non-critical stuff, that has DevOps and QA processes and infrastructure that would make your script kiddie head spin for WEEKS, LET ALONE FUCKIN MILITARY SW DRIVING MILITARY EQUIPMENT YOU ARROGANT KNOWITALL FUCK.
Please, just please, FOCUS ON FUCKING DOING VIDEOS ABOUT STUFF YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND, instead of stuff your ego overinflated from years of debunking dunning-krugers tells you that you're an expert in despite never actually having worked even near those fields. PLEASE. You are amazing when doing those, but this bullshit is just fucking rage-inducing. Don't ever talk about software again, because that's obviously YOUR dunning-kruger area, you fuckin bigheaded script kiddie.12 -
My GOTOs are:
- Check if focus on teamwork is emphasized. Does the company state themselves? Spend a day with the team if possible, see how they work together.
- What tools do they use? Sometimes this will hint you towards whether or not you will encounter a good environment or a jumbled mess.
- Is there organized communication? I know, sometimes there are too many meetings, but that is better than too vew. How often does the team meet, even if just for 10mins? How does management communicate with the team? What ways are provided to give feedback? Are suggestions to improve practices welcome?
I left my last company and joined my current one, where these things work out the way they should. While I liked both projects with respect to development, my mental state has improved dramatically in the new environment. Stress is down, productivity is up. I love my job. -
Are you worried about your development environment becoming more and more unstable?
Let me give you an example: I've been (mostly) a .NET developer for about 10 years now and yes Visual Studio crashed sometimes but not very often. Also whenever I found something that seemed like a bug in e.g. the MVC framework I always realized that the problem was in my code. However recently there is a VS update almost every week, and I more and more often bump into open GitHub issues without a fix.
Is this the same with other development environments? I also had a lot of issues with XCode/Swift but I never expected that to be stable...1 -
Boss: "You hardcoded the redirect uri in the code (Early on during development and forgot about it, because apple OAuth is a piece of shit), but don't worry I fixed it by hardcoding the uri with the production host into the config file where clearly all settings are fetched from the OS Environment variables at runtime. This will surely fix the problem in staging we have, no need to thank me"
5 -
Started new job at startup and finished all the development environment setup started development it was going smooth for one week.all the created API were working fine on the next day morning without any changes API's were giving cors error.asked my senior what must be the problem he said bypass cors and figure out the problem after trying for 1hrs i couldn't figure out what was the problem but API's were back to normal without any changes. then after sometime same day in zoom call i asked what was the problem he said show me the error but I couldn't reproduced the same cors error he then lectured me for 1 hrs and after that he said that learn to solve by your own dont come with silly mistake like this to me.
I don't know what was the problem he even refused me show to what the problem was.5 -
My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)
The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.
The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .
But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .
Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.
I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?2 -
I continue to internally read and study about Smalltalk in an effort to see where we might have FUCKED UP and went backwards in terms of software engineering since I do not believe that complex source code based languages are the solution.
So I have Pharo. Nothin to complex really, everything is an object, yet, you do have room for building DSL's inside of it over a simple object model with no issue, the system browser can be opened across multiple screens (morph windows inside of a smalltalk system) for which you can edit you code in composable blocks with no issues. Blocks being a particular part of the language (think Ruby in more modern features) give ample room for functional programming. Thus far we have FP and OO (the original mind you) styles out in the open for development.
Your main code can be executed and instantly ALTER the live environment of a program as it is running, if what you are trying to do is stupid it won't affect the live instance, live programming is ahead of its time, and impressive, considering how old Smalltalk is. GUI applications can be given headless (this is also old in terms of how this shit was first distributed) So I can go ahead and package the virtual machine with the entire application into a folder, and distribute it agains't an organization "but why!!!! that package is 80+ mbs!") yeah cuz it carries the entire virtual machine, but go ahead and give it to the Mac user, or the Linux user, it will run, natively once it is clicked.
Server side applications run in similar fashion to php, in terms of lifecycles of request and how session storage is handled, this to me is interesting, no additional runtimes, drop it on a server, configure it properly and off you go, but this is common on other languages so really not that much of a point.
BUT if over a network a user is using your application and you change it and send that change over the network then the the change is damn near instant and fault tolerant due to the nature of the language.
Honestly, I don't know what went wrong or why we are not bringing this shit to the masses, the language was built for fucking kids, it was the first "y'all too stupid to get it, so here is simple" engine and we still said "nah fuck it, unlimited file system based programs, horrible build engines and {}; all over the place"
I am now writing a large budget managing application in Pharo Smalltalk which I want to go ahead and put to test soon at my institution. I do not have any issues thus far, other than my documentation help is literally "read the source code of the package system" which is easy as shit since it is already included inside. My scripts are small, my class hierarchies cover on themselves AND testing is part of the system. I honestly see no faults other than "well....fuck you I like opening vim and editing 300000000 files"
And honestly that is fine, my questions are: why is a paradigm that fits procedural, functional and OBVIOUSLY OO while including an all encompassing IDE NOT more famous, SELECTION is fine and other languages are a better fit, but why is such environment not more famous?9 -
How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:
Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.
Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.
But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.
Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.
I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.
To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.
Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.9 -
Full Ubuntu on Samsung Galaxy S9
Samsung is announcing the beta launch of Linux on DeX which extends the value of Samsung DeX to Linux developers. Linux on DeX empowers developers to build apps within a Linux development environment by connecting their Galaxy device to a larger screen for a PC-like experience.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/11/...1 -
Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.
What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).
Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.
So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.
The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).
One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).
The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.
Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.
Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ? -
Windows of Linux, Which one is better environment for web and Android development? If Linux please specify which distribution.18
-
F**king hate Windows for its insanely confusing proxy setup required for software development...
> Setup proxy in Windows network settings
> Then, setup HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY environment variable at the system/user level.
> Followed by separate proxy settings for java, maven, docker, git, npm, bower, jspm, eclipse, VS Code, every damn IDE/Editor which downloads plugins...
> On top of everything, find out the domains which does not need to go through proxy and add them to NO_PROXY.. at each level..
> It does not end here. Sometimes, I need to setup proxy for SSH connections... like, if I have to use git with SSH and not HTTP/S... Uhhh....
More than half of the problems me and my dev team face is related to setting the right proxy. Why can't it be like, set in one place and everything picks up from there, like in any linux machine or for God's sake, a Mac ?
Worst of all is, my org uses a configuration script, which resolves into a list of proxy servers, from which one of them will be used. So, I need to download that script, find out which is the right proxy server and then, use it in all the aforesaid places... WTH ?????
Is this a common workplace problem for all developers ??? Will this be solved by Windows Subsystem for Linux ???9 -
Adobe's ExtendScript toolkit is abyssmal. I find posts from 2008 referring to issues that have not changed even in CC2017. Do you think they are small issues I'm bitching about? I'll list 2. First, the toolkit only colours "var, return, for, foreach" and a bit more keywords and the strings, of course you can set up color schemes but those are limited and not colouring stuff. The second issue is auto-complete, it rarely kicks in and suggestions have 0 connection to what are you doing and are always the same. It doesn't recognize anything of what are you doing.
Probably in 2008 you had to program with the manual near you like writing assembler, now there's an improvement in 2017, they got a window named object browser or something like that that actually is a summarised portable manual that could've been easily transformed in auto-complete suggestions.
Adobe writes about this and I quote: "a complete integrated development environment". Although I will not write much scripts in it, I need to write a big one and thought about extracting that object data and putting it in a more capable javascript editor. LO and Behold what I discovered, the ExtendScript Toolkit that's supposed to edit Extended javascript and save it as jsx or jsxbin is almost completely (it has some dlls too) built using around 100 jsx files. It's the equivalent of building a js IDE to edit js.
Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile, I tried.
-
Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.
The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.
Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.
That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.
The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.
The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files
If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.
Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.1 -
One thing I truly fucking dislike about the development life is knowing about server administration. I think that the mental hurdle that is to develop a huge application, make a stable dev environment, learn all the tools, tricks, techniques, modern standards, processes whatever, detailing software engineering are way tf too much to also handle server admin shit.
We don't have anyone at work that deals with that, and as such my devs need to know how to do entire series of maintenance shit that just takes time and effort plus hours of notetaking and study. I mean I get it, they should know their way around a linux environment enough to troubleshoot issues that are related to the os when working with some tools, but fuuuuuuuck me man, setting up a server, even for the holy grail of easy (standard lamp stack) takes way tf too much.
Wish we could have a dedicated server admin in the team.
I know where my faults are, setting up servers is something that I know but just can't be assed with in terms of keeping up, I wish we had a devops dedicated server admin deployment guru cuz I really cannot stand losing hours doing this shit.
It also diminishes good s admins in value, "weLl ThE deVs caN do It" YEAH BITCH but wouldn't it be nice to have an expert concentrating on JUST THAT?
FUCK man7 -
I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.
Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:
//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO
# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO
# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO
# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO
# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO
# Do not read the documentation. YOLO
# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO
# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)
# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO
# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO
# You always use production as an environment. YOLO
# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO
# Don’t indent. YOLO
# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO
# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO
# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO
# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO
So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.
*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.
*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.
*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.
*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.
*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.2 -
Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:
So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.
So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)
So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.
So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!
I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights. -
More rants coming up.
1st
Working with a guy who I am not sure has the necessary experience to begin with.
The person who hired him told me to teach the guy for him to catch up to our project and its pace. He has some experience with Java. Which our project is being developed in java in a linux dev environment in a full stack way. So we handle front to infrastructure.
First day working with him and I saw this guy is trouble.
1st - doesn’t know effing git commands. Who doesn’t know git nowadays. Ok i can forgive him for that. But damn this guy’s learning curve is so slow. After s month of joining, he still has to look up the commands in his photo cheatsheet.
2nd - doesn’t know linux basic cli commands like cd, ls, rm. not an ounce of knowledge. He told me he is used to developing in Windows. Now this. I can’t forgive him for not knowing this shit. cd (change dir) even exists in windows command line. He even has guts to say to everyone he wants to try working in our servers. The HORROR!
3rd - not sure if knowing junit and matchers of hamcrest, if you are working with Java is a must. But this guy doesn’t understand Matchers of Junit. How the fuck did he ensure effing quality in his prev work.
All in all, seems like this guy doesn’t understand the basics of current development tools.9 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
We called a customer because that on their server a directory is missing which was important for production.
Turned out that they didn't miss a directory because they worked in the development environment of the same customer but in a different location. For the last 3 months. -
I tried setting up an F* development environment on a Mac…
Yeah, that’s the rant. You can probably guess how it went…8 -
So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.
Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!
So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.
That was such a fun Friday afternoon. -
Windows 10 updating, decides it would be cool to install gigabytes of sdk, edge, and other bloatware without asking first, on a metered connection i use for work.
Guys, between you there and those fanboy demons in cupertino, one wants to just shut it all off and return to monke.
Sidenote this, because all of this nonsense started on that crap called Windows 8, which was in the end caused to copy that Unholy crap (sold as gold) that is Apple's range of products. It's a company that sells designs nowadays, like Prada, to say, Jobs era is long gone. Everything related to Apple, Mac, Safari, Development, Gaming, UI/UX, productivity and whatever is a
f***ing Nightmare.
We alreay have a global plague, and Apple exists, we dont' need you too making another catastrophe.
All this said,
Use your goddamn trillions to create your own customizable environment that is stable, fast, and WITHOUT BULLSHIT.
I don't give a mindflying F**k of the blurs, i know how to place them with a shell, if i need those. I want control, the shit i decide is going to happen, to happen fast.
This is of Critical importance, because it defines my productivity. And considering we're all sealed indoors since 2019, i want to get away from my pc asap and live my life, instead of spending time(and money, in this moment of emergency) fixing your F**kfests, or else seeing my pc slowing down to death.
First: IF i want stuff on my pc, I know how to install something, thank you.
Second: You can take it, all your Useless - Bugged as Hell - Nonsensical - and of no practical use Bloatware, and shove it deep in your Backdoor.
I'll debloat my pc with batches again, and there's nothing you can do to stop me doing that at every update you force me into.
So please, stop wasting my time, and yours.4 -
Long story ahead
Background:
I recently started a job in a smallish startup doing web development in a mostly js stack as an entry-junior engineer/dev. I’m the only person actively working on our internal tools as my Lead Engineer (the only other in house dev) is working on other stuff.
Now I was given a two week sprint to rebuild a portion of our legacy internal app from angular 1.2 with material-ui looking components with no psd’s or cut-outs of any kind to a React and bootstrap ui for the front end and convert our .net API routes into Node.js ones. I had to build the API routes, SQL queries (as there were plenty of changes and reiterations that I had to go through to get the exact data I needed to display), and front end. I worked from 9am until 11pm every day for those two weeks including weekends as our company has a huge show this upcoming week.
I finish up this past sunday and push to our staging environment. The UI is 5.5/10 as we’re changing all of our styling to bootstrap and I’m no ui expert. The api has tests and works flawlessly (tm).
So we go into code review and everything is working as expected until one tab that I made erred out and was written down as a “Needs to be fixed.”
This fix was just a null value handler that took three minutes and a push back to staging, but that wasnt before a stupendous amount of shit being flung my way for the ui not looking great and that one bug was a huge deal and that he couldnt believe it slipped through my fingers.
Honestly, I’m feeling really unmotivated to do anything else. I overworked myself for that only to be shit on for one mistake and my ui being lack-luster with no guides.
Am I being a baby about this or is this something to learn from?1 -
I have been using Windows for decades. Recently got a Macbook Pro. In just a week, I realise that I have been working in such a slow paced environment. Constant updates, background tasks, internet chewing, more load and build times. I don't know about other stuff, but for programming and development, I have completely replaced Windows with this new machine.
Btw, this PC has better hardware than the Macbook Pro.8 -
An idea for a website:
A page where you paste a github url and it clones the repository on the server and presents it to you with a IDE interface, lets you apply little changes and build it.
A "development environment as a service", in few words. Seriously, browsing github files is a pain and I can't obviously clone all the interesting projects I want to explore!7 -
* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)
* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME
* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)
* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc
* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.
* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)
* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.
* Testing days arrive
* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.
* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.
Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.
Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?
Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)
Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.
I fucking hate software development sometimes.
Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.4 -
Just tried the new PYCHARM update
Honestly speaking I was a bit disappointed with the update as a whole.
Firstly, I it didn't recognize conda as the default development environment and moreover it didn't let me switch from virtualenvs also it took away my in built terminal option and to further aggravate my miseries the performance of the IDE as a whole had fallen quite a bit for instance at one point the ide alone was using around 1.5GiB of RAM and a huge
chunk of my CPU usage -
Android Studio is by far worst development environment I've ever seen. Slow as fuck, messed up and cumbersome, not much better than eclipse. Menus are hilariously fucked up. On top of that, clear new setup (on Windows) may as well melt up your PC if you have that shit running overnight: after a weekend I came to the office and my MBP is fucking screaming and breathing hot air... I was WTF is that, and when I logged in, this fucking garbage android studio was taking 100% of all 8/16 cores ... WHAT A FUCKING HIDEOUS PILE OF SHIT FROM GOOGLE. Google: please kill this project, no need to improve or fix it, it's garbage. Start over.26
-
I'm living it.
I started an internship at this web store made of different pieces and following no apparent rule or convention. They asked me to do this landing page, but I can't access to the development environment, nor push, create a docker, kill myself, nothing. I have to build from the DOM and write with inline style a page copied and pasted, with 300 lines of CSS already in the tpl, overwritten bootstrap 3 and two main CSS files linked. And "they don't do !important".
I wish I could say I'm learning a lot, but not. My life has become a waste of hours trying to please a company stuck and aged. -
Alright wish me luck boys and girls, actually started development on my first 'proper' application, building an sms client using the push bullet API for elementary OS...
First time using Vala, first time building something that isn't game or web related in a real world environment...3 -
Eclipse with ADT. Never again. I'm so glad Google and JetBrains have put together a really great environment for Android development.
-
Started my first private App project using all the goodies of 2017 android development like TDD, Android architecture components (hence MVVM), kotlin (which I yet have to learn), RxJava2 (if I need it additionally to AAC) and maybe try to set up a CI environment.
Wish me luck guys and girls 😁 -
Unpopular opinion: macOS is better for working on the go than Linux.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Linux... for servers and desktops. Linux, particularly Arch, is incredible at running only the bare minimum of what you need in a system, so that you use the power of the machine to fullest. Don't get me started on the out-of-the-box compatibility with development in general.
However, I just spent 2 days trying to get the freaking wifi working on my Linux laptop. When I opened up my Macbook, it *just worked.* I really don't have the time to be dicking around with configs when I am working on the go.
Especially with technologies such as Docker, Git, and SSH, it's actually really easy to have the same development environment on my macbook and Linux desktop... and as much as I hate to say it, I think it's no more Linux on laptops for me anymore.10 -
Well, we have a designer/front-ender who's forced to work the same way the devs work (local development environment), yet he doesn't understand a single thing he's doing.
I'm pretty sure he's never going to understand it, and I feel like he's better off just doing UI/UX, he's pretty good at that!1 -
Integrating Google recaptcha into my web service. For some reason it always errors, both on a production and development environment, correct domains configured, and with he simplest setup. I'm fucking lost, documentation assumes it actually works. Similar errors on stack overflow and Google groups either got no answers or have obvious issues.
Fuck this man4 -
GitHub has launched Codespaces : A feature that lets you code directly on the web {as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud}.
According to the Github Blog: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.
In addition to Codespaces, GitHub is also launching Discussions : A forum-like feature that lives under your project that allows others to engage with you and other contributors.
Code scanning : With code scanning enabled, every git push is scanned for new potential security vulnerabilities, and results are displayed directly in your pull request.19 -
TIL don't rely too much on in memory databases if your client runs development and production environment on the same machine.
Just don't7 -
Setting up a proper development environment with configs in JavaScript takes more time than to develop a small application you want to launch.5
-
Dear Docker for Windows I know you exist to make devs on Windows life easier. But DEAR GOD, with all the firewall/group policy problems..you have been the pain of my existence during this short time developing on Windows.
Literally have a countdown on the time left until I get to no longer do a rain dance for my development environment to work.
2 -
Spent the weekend geeking out getting my head around a proper Docker based environment for my development env at home and for the team... 90% done and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't start my Splunk instance up.... I'd set the default logging to Splunk.... Chicken & Egg probs!
But how awesome is docker with portainer and app templates eh?! -
Who the fuck thought java development is okay on a VDI ! Eclipse runs shit even on local environment and running it on a vm located in a different country with 3gb of vram?
You want to do a file search? Wait for 5mins
You want to. Build via gradle. Wait for 15 min
Fucking idiots.1 -
I legit never understood the hate for VB.NET in the land of Microsoft development. To be entirely fair, I only used it it that one class at uni. But other than that I had never used it in the real world. The closest thing I had done with BASIC was VBScript, and even tho I was ok with it(even liked it) I damn well know that it is not something that I would use to build web apps with anymore.
But I am inclined to give VB.NET a chance only because I remember being able to make sense of my peers code in school. Just by reading it, sure it might be verbose as all fucking hell, but we were using VS(notice that i said VS not VS Code) and we had all the bells and whistles of autocomplete and intellisense.
Currently tho, I somewhat wanted to try a more modular approach to my fucking around with web apps, we are considering Rails and Django for a project at work. But since we already have windows servers we thought about the possibility of using .net core. We all like C# as a language and I did work with ASP.NET MVC before so we are considering that as well. That and our sys admin had tons of experience setting that as an environment. When developers are not too sure it is good to rely on the admin's expertise. -
After I was woken up in the morning by my friend that had a meeting nearby.
We went for coffee and as part of usual Wednesday I also decided to go to cinema to see Dr Dollitle ( not verry funny ).
I felt relaxed as everyone fucked off from me since Monday.
I was so happy of doing nothing after the movie I decided to try to make both frontend and backend for new application screens in finite time.
I could have waited for frontend developer to be back from his vacation but since I can also do it I decided to do it myself.
I did frontend part first with mock data and after finishing it before 2 pm asked if client will have time to discuss it. He didn’t so we decided I try to add real data and publish it on test environment.
Well those are mock up screens anyway so I decided to eat and smoke to chill but also try to work anyway.
I just finished backend for those screens and switched test environment to new branch.
Looks like they’re working for biggest client customers.
Usually it takes about a week or two to describe frontend developer what client wants but let’s see if I still have some frontend UX empathy left and can speed up development by couple of days. -
So I'm returning from parental leave on next week...
One of the projects I'm involved in, was at 10% progress when I left, had planning and documentation made by me, development environment and test suite setup by me and had tests and was being reviewed.
Right now it should be arround 75% progress, no longer is being reviewed, planning is not being followed and no tests have been made since I've left...
Why bother with dumb ass devs!2 -
Finally took the time to start learning Angular 2. I wanted to do it right so I set up the development environment with webpack. Man does Angular 2 take a lot longer to get setup properly versus Angular 1. I mean it's worth it to do it properly but it was a lot more labor intensive getting a good dev environment setup than I had anticipated.4
-
Guys I'm very bad at staying focused on one thing.
For a bit, I've been learning web development, and I've been working on a page for myself. Past few days I haven't really done anything because I'm trying to actually fucking graduate high school and as of right now I am NOT graduating.
But today I was taking my calculus final and I ended up talking to the teacher for a bit. He said he has an older tablet that he's trying to turn into a type of wall mounted home automation system. I believe he said something about using essentially a minimal Linux install to do it.
That really got me thinking, because I had a fairly similar idea a while ago (not exactly home automation, but just using an old tablet as a small Linux device), but never put in any actual effort to get it done. Now with winter break coming up for me, I really want to try and work on it some.
So before I start doing a fuckton of research on this, has anyone here ever done something similar to an Android device? I'm not talking about using that Linux Deploy app or a chroot. I'm talking about basically removing the Android environment, taking it down to a base Linux install. I just want to know if anyone can steer me in the right direction to save me some time3 -
It is now apparent to me that I need to work in an environment where managers empower their development team to choose the correct tools and processes for the job.1
-
After learning a bit about alife I was able to write
another one. It took some false starts
to understand the problem, but afterward I was able to refactor the problem into a sort of alife that measured and carefully tweaked various variables in the simulator, as the algorithm
explored the paramater space. After a few hours of letting the thing run, it successfully returned a remainder of zero on 41.4% of semiprimes tested.
This is the bad boy right here:
tracks[14]
[15, 2731, 52, 144, 41.4]
As they say, "he ain't there yet, but he got the spirit."
A 'track' here is just a collection of critical values and a fitness score that was found given a few million runs. These variables are used as input to a factoring algorithm, attempting to factor
any number you give it. These parameters tune or configure the algorithm to try slightly different things. After some trial runs, the results are stored in the last entry in the list, and the whole process is repeated with slightly different numbers, ones that have been modified
and mutated so we can explore the space of possible parameters.
Naturally this is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the critical thing is that for each configuration of numbers representing a track (and its results), I chose the lowest fitness of three runs.
Meaning hypothetically theres room for improvement with a tweak of the core algorithm, or even modifications or mutations to the
track variables. I have no clue if this scales up to very large semiprime products, so that would be one of the next steps to test.
Fitness also doesn't account for return speed. Some of these may have a lower overall fitness, but might in fact have a lower basis
(the value of 'i' that needs to be found in order for the algorithm to return rem%a == 0) for correctly factoring a semiprime.
The key thing here is that because all the entries generated here are dependent on in an outer loop that specifies [i] must never be greater than a/4 (for whatever the lowest factor generated in this run is), we can potentially push down the value of i further with some modification.
The entire exercise took 2.1735 billion iterations (3-4 hours, wasn't paying attention) to find this particular configuration of variables for the current algorithm, but as before, I suspect I can probably push the fitness value (percentage of semiprimes covered) higher, either with a few
additional parameters, or a modification of the algorithm itself (with a necessary rerun to find another track of equivalent or greater fitness).
I'm starting to bump up to the limit of my resources, I keep hitting the ceiling in my RAD-style write->test->repeat development loop.
I'm primarily using the limited number of identities I know, my gut intuition, combine with looking at the numbers themselves, to deduce relationships as I improve these and other algorithms, instead of relying strictly on memorizing identities like most mathematicians do.
I'm thinking if I want to keep that rapid write->eval loop I'm gonna have to upgrade, or go to a server environment to keep things snappy.
I did find that "jiggling" the parameters after each trial helped to explore the parameter
space better, so I wrote some methods to do just that. But what I wouldn't mind doing
is taking this a bit of a step further, and writing some code to optimize the variables
of the jiggle method itself, by automating the observation of real-time track fitness,
and discarding those changes that lead to the system tending to find tracks with lower fitness.
I'd also like to break up the entire regime into a training vs test set, but for now
the results are pretty promising.
I knew if I kept researching I'd likely find extensions like this. Of course tested on
billions of semiprimes, instead of simply millions, or tested on very large semiprimes, the
effect might disappear, though the more i've tested, and the larger the numbers I've given it,
the more the effect has become prevalent.
Hitko suggested in the earlier thread, based on a simplification, that the original algorithm
was a tautology, but something told me for a change that I got one correct. Without that initial challenge I might have chalked this up to another false start instead of pushing through and making further breakthroughs.
I'd also like to thank all those who followed along, helped, or cheered on the madness:
In no particular order ,demolishun, scor, root, iiii, karlisk, netikras, fast-nop, hazarth, chonky-quiche, Midnight-shcode, nanobot, c0d4, jilano, kescherrant, electrineer, nomad,
vintprox, sariel, lensflare, jeeper.
The original write up for the ideas behind the concept can be found at:
https://devrant.com/rants/7650612/...
If I left your name out, you better speak up, theres only so many invitations to the orgy.
Firecode already says we're past max capacity!5 -
Junior Software Developer Job( $37k-$42k USD)
-1 year experience
- J2EE, Javascript, HTML, XML, SQL
- object oriented design and implementation
- management of relational and non-relational such as Oracle, PostGreSQL and Cassandra
- Lifecycle and Agile methods
- Familiarity with the Eclipse development environment and with tools such as Hibernate, JMS, ,TomCat/Gemini/Jetty, OSGi.
• UNIX skills, including Bash or other scripting language
• Experience installing and configuring software packages
• ActiveMQ troubleshooting/knowledge
• Experience in scientific data processing and analytical science in general
• Automated testing tools and procedures, including JUnit testing, Selenium, etc.
• Experience in interfacing with scientific instrumentation, potentially over IP networks
• Familiarity with modern web development, user interface and other ever-evolving front-end
technologies, such as React, TypeScript, Material, Jest, etc.
I am betting they don't get many people applying.8 -
so if i get this correctly :
1. mongodb( community server) is going to create some files in my system which will be called "databases/collections/document bullshit via its own special process called mongod (similar to mysql , but ok)
2. my python flask app is going to connect to it via its official driver pymongo (which could be used directly)
3. mongoengine is a library (more of a wrapper on pymongo) providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)
4. flask-mongoengine is library (more of a wrapper on mongoengine providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via mongoengine via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)
5. flask-pymongo is some another bullshit library/wrapper that took away 6hours of mine which again is "A FUCKING WRAPPER PROVIDING EASY WAYS FOR CONNECTING TO MONGODB VIA PYMONGO"
seriously, fuck web development. Why can't the original driver (i.e pymongo from mongodb devs) could have simpler wrappers? and why does my fucking tutorial instructor had to use the most fucking rarely used flask-mongoengine (which i accidently read as flask-pymongo and got f**ked) to teach newbies? fucking day wasted trying to understand this crap.
I don't like monnopolies, but its somewhat good that the mobile environment is still in the hands of nononsense players like google and oracle(java) . atleast we don't have people releasing wrapper over wrapper over wrapper and then fighting about which wrapper is better to use.
Like , even when devs started cmplaining that android dbs are too difficult to understand, google themselves created an actively supported wrapper that shutted down the fight over which wrapper to use(sqldelight, realm,sql bright etc)5 -
FUCK
Anyone here who graduated in industrial sector engineering fields but managed to switch their careers towards IT/development? Considering that I do have related competences and solid foundations on 2/3 languages.
My job fucking sucks. The pay is good but I'm not doing shit since 2 weeks. Everyone works superslow because there is no shit to do and boredom kills us slowly. My family says that I just need to be assigned to a project and be patient. I don't want a super fast no free time environment, but if there are no challenges any single day what is even the point of getting up in the morning.
It's FUCKING depressing :(3 -
Tried to install WAMP manually to learn PHP. It almost put me off development altogether, but great when it worked and I learnt a lot doing it. The next time I used Xampp before moving on to vagrant & VMs.
Sometimes setting up the Dev environment is the hardest part of learning. But better to learn in dev than production!3 -
A developer couldn't get a application performance monitoring (APM) tool to trace his application. They claimed that their libraries and their configurations were alright and that the APM tool was non-performant.
The developer then argues with sysadmin that the APM tool can't trace the application and that there's nothing wrong with the application or the configurations. When sysadmin questions whether the developer got the tool to work anywhere, they say, "No" and head off to make it work at least in one place. They come back saying that it works on their development environment (which is their local machine). Sysadmin claims that the system configurations on the server instances cannot be matched by the development environment and there could be a lot more factors to be considered for the problem. The sysadmin asks to prove it on a server instance on one of the test environments and then they'd agree that it is a problem with the tool. They also argue that this is not the only application that uses the APM tool and the tool happily traces other applications with no issues.
The developer tries the same configuration on a staging instance and fails. In order to make it work, they silently uninstall the existing version of the APM tool and then compiles an unstable branch of the tool. It finally works with this version.
They go back to the sysadmin and show that it works on the staging environment, but does not on production. After banging their head on the wall for a while, the sysadmin figure that the tool had been swapped out for the unstable branch that was manually compiled. When questioned, the developer responds, "It works with this version on staging, so deploy the same version on production"
WTF? You don't deploy an unstable branch to production. Just because you can't make it work on the stable branch doesn't mean that it is the problem with the tool itself. There's a big difference between a stable branch and a non-stable branch. How would you feel if the sysadmin retorted by asking you to deploy the staging branch of your application to production? -
rant/!rant
So I just started working at the beginning of January and I have no fucking clue about anything especially Web development.
But now I have a week to figure out how in the world I am going set up a workflow for some secretaries so that the higher ups get a printed coupon with a password on it, so they can log into our WLAN via a captive portal that I also need to set up.
I am thinking about a website that takes a list of names and settings (probably excel or smt) passes them to the WiFi management softwares API and then generates some PDF file for download that just needs to get printed.
Did I mention that I have no Dev tools (I have notepad, yeah the one without ++), no test environment, no prior experience and no clue how to do it?
But somehow I love this challenge and am glad that my colleagues don't send me to get coffee but let me work.
Am I insane?4 -
everyone glorifies ethereum and its smart contracts, but the actual build tools and overall development environment around it sucks balls.
when testing a contract locally with truffle develop and metamask, you have to reinstall metamask after every transaction because it gets out of sync with your local chain... people are seriously okay with working with this shit?3 -
Pulled my hair out over one today (and a week ago when I first saw the issue)
Setting up development environment. Created test user and test database and used mysqldump to copy data over.
MySQL was executing a function as the wrong user. Checked my config files, checked my config reader, checked my database connection, checked checked checked. Checked everything twice, I felt like Santa.
Changed the password in the config file to make sure it was logging in right. It threw an error still but not one I had expected so I figured the login still worked (My bias was that I thought the config file was not working or the mysql library was caching authentication. Both were wrong but this blinded my debugging. Foolish, I have forgotten my training)
Logged into the database directly via client. *didn't bother executing the function because I was only testing auth*
Think
Think
Think
Search entire project for database username. It's gotta be hard coded by accident SOMEWHERE.
It's not.
Why
Why
Why
Wait.
-- Flashback to how the test db was created -- What's actually in this damn script?
DEFINER `production_user` CREATE PROCEDURE `old_db`.`procedure_name`
Two issues: definer is old user (this is the error I was seeing) and its creating the procedure on the old db (this would be the next error I would have found if I kept going)
Fuck mysqldump. Install mysqldbcopy. Works
Put hair back in head. -
I just got a call from Satya. He informed me that Microsoft has successfully acquired the Linux kernel and all future development will be closed sourced.
Here's a sneak peek of the official announcement:
There will be a newer version released tomorrow that will include the Windows desktop environment as well as patch a critical 0-day security flaw that was recently discovered in all versions of Linux.
To prevent exploitation, we will activate a kill switch which will disable all systems running any flavor of Linux next week.
Thus we advise you upgrade ASAP, existing users can get the latest version online for $500.8 -
It could either turn out really well or most of the day will be wasted on setting up one's development environment
-
Okay, this is quite hard to explain properly, but I'm actually scared of my personal future.
In about a year, I finish school and I don't have a straight plan of what to do next. I want to work independently, preferably as a game dev, but I imagine that to be a hard task. I have thought of doing a bachelor's degree in game development, but the university I prefer to go to costs 20k€, which is a huge sum and I don't even know whether it would be actually worth it. The university states that 20% of all their graduated students work independently afterwards and they even offer you a flexible "loan" (not sure if it's the right term) you can pay off while you start working, but I fear I won't be able to pay it back, I cannot imagine making this much money any time soon after I start working independently as game dev. Additionally I fear I won't be able to keep my motivation up, since I struggle doing so already, on the other hand my lack of motivation could be caused by this toxic environment I live in.
I've also considered doing freelancing, but when I'm scrolling through the requests made, I never find something I am experienced in, I don't know what request is best to get started with freelancing.
I just don't know what to do in the future and I'm scared and considering to go to this university is probably pretty stupid already and I consider it as me ranting myself, because of my nonexisting self-esteem. So I don't know what to expect from this post, I just needed to share.1 -
I'm writing all the dev things I know in a docs site as a means to be hireable should I need to switch jobs.
I'm not gonna go too deep on how I'm doing it. One style I'm enjoying is making every article take only one page long, and if they take longer, maybe consider breaking it into another article.
Fuck long articles. Yes, that's a bit autistic.
But I will describe the challenges I'm finding (which are quite many) in further detail.
One of them is that words can be ambiguous. Production can mean the production environment but it can also mean production in plain english.
And there are tons of cases like this.
Because of this, I felt a lot of confusion in my beginner days. So it my objective to write this as to prevent as much confusion as possible.
Granted, I don't want to write "development for dummies". Software is complex. But because it's complex on its own, I don't want to add complexity to the learning process through obscure language usage.
"Fine", I say, "I'll disambiguate". But this means I find myself branching out very often into fundamental or commonly used software terms like "framework", "model", "scaffold", "algorithm", "viewport", "breakpoint", etc.
Another challenge is reaching good levels of completitude.
This means I have to explain that obscure CLI flag I never used in my life.
If I don't do this, then what makes my docs different than these superficial dev.to or medium posts? Nothing.
But trying to explain EVERYTHING about a software can generate a lot of frustration: I never finish.
It also makes me wonder "do I even know shit?". I think some amount of insecurity is healthy and pushes myself forward.
But at some point it's kind of making me feel like shit. Maybe I just need to keep learning.1 -
I think UPS' Api documentation and service must be the worst documented and build API I have ever seen from a corporate.
1. The developer website is a mess. A total mess. You can barely find the API type you are looking for.
2. When you get the API and download the documentation, the files, .pdf etc is still a mess. Pages long that most are craps.
3. Each request returns Status Code 200. Even if it is an error. This blew my mind.
4. Each request, based on error type or based on tracking activity returns different JSON schema.
For example, the JSON Schema for a shipment in transit is different from JSON schema for a shipment that has been delivered. A shipment that has been returned, a shipment that required signature etc. They are different from each other.
5. And the worst. They do not provide with test tracking codes. I have found some on internet, but they do not work in development and production environment.4 -
Developer environment on Mac > Developer environment on Windows.
Just saying. Unless it’s for game development. Or for shitty server software development AKA Microsoft Server 2003.11 -
I've been working as a developer for 10 years now... I got my first software development job when I was still learning for my masters.
After all this time I have switched programming languages and product types a few times from web development to mobile apps to desktop software (C++, CEF, QT,).
And I have come to the conclusion that I want early retirement... like right now retirement... I'm done dealing with management that doesn't understand shit... dealing with people we have outsourced part of the shit to... needing to fix stuff that is broken after some other person refactored the code and didn't fully test it and it somehow got approved... dealing with people that think that "know better" and implemented things like that 5 years ago because they thought like "THAT" and will not accept my merge request because of that.
Like don't get me wrong I love to make and develop software, but since this is the 3rd job in the row with a toxic environment like this I feel like I need to move to the country side and open up a farm or something :|2 -
Finally done with school. It were three years of ups and downs.
The downs were plenty and mostly in the way school material was organized.
We've spend years learning web development where the course should have been more broad (application development)
So by the time my first internship period of half a year approached I searched for a company outside of web development and ended up at a company which did serious games using unity C#. Those were the best months of my 3 years. I managed to push the company into a direction for a future even though it was reletively small.
After that I took up .net and got the MTA C# Fundamentals certificate from microsoft itself. (School offered the exam).
Then there was the 2nd internship.
Worked for a company who sold intranets to other enterprises and I developed a mobile app which connected a user's phone to their account on their intranet. Allowing to seperate work and their private life.
That project was fun but the company itself was terrible. 4 people at the office and the owner treated us as objects rather than people. The company was too small for such an environment and most of them were irritated 9 times out of 10. Glad to be rid of them.
Now I'm in the process of looking for a job and have a meeting with a recruiter tomorrow
Wish me luck.4 -
I like rants that are thought provoking and push a message forward regardless of whether they may sting a little, so for my first post on here I'd like to hit at home with many of you.
Html5 "Native" Applications are not needed. Let's cover mobile first of all, the misconception that apps are written in either javascript or Native android/ Native ios environment. Or even some third party paid tools like xamarin is quite strange to me. OpenGL ES is on both IOS and Android there is no difference. It's quite easy to write once run everywhere but with native performance and not having to jump through js when it's not needed. Personally I never want to see html or css if I'm working on a mobile app or desktop. Which brings me to desktop, I can't begin to describe how unthought out an electron app is. Memory usage, storage space for embedding chromium, web views gained at the expense of literally everything else, cross platform desktop development has been around for decades, openGL is everywhere enough said. Finally what about targeting browser if your writing a native app for mobile and desktop let's say in c++ and it's not in javascript how can it turn back into javascript, well luckily c++ has emscripten which does that simply put, or you could be using a cross complier language like haxe which is what I use. It benefits with type safety, while exporting both c++ and javascript code. Conclusion in reality I see the appeal to the js ecosystem it's large filled with big companies trying to make js cross development stronger every day. However development in my mind should be a series of choices, choices that are invisible don't help anyone, regardless of the popularity of the choice, or the skill required.8 -
So, I decided over the weekend that I would move my entire dev environment to Linux. No Windows on the laptop and only as a backup boot system for my home PC. I wanted to wean myself off of Linux as only being a VM and move to the full blown desktop.
I can only describe my experience to that of having your first kid: lot's of crying and joy at the same time.
Things I've learned:
1. The install is amazingly painless. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work straight out of the box no configuring needed.
2. OH MY GOD THE CUSTOMIZATION. Rocking Arc Dark theme on Gnome3 = EVERYTHING IS
ALWAYS DARK MICROSOFT WHY IS THIS NOT A THING.
3. Getting Java servlets to work has been hell. I gave up trying to get them to work in eclipse and moved over to IntelliJ. More trial and error before I can figure out why tomcat won't fucking work in eclipse but it's fine in IntelliJ.
4. The UI and overall work flow has been improved after getting past the learning curve. Gnome3 is way better from when I tried it out 4 years ago.
5. Vim has a steep learning curve but I am starting to understand the net benefits of it. It'll probably be a solid month before I get good with it.
6. Loosing Microsoft Office has been a little bit of a challenge but their suite is online so....meh. I do miss Visual Studio though, and am still looking for an adequate replacement for C++ and C# development.
Overall it's been a challenge but I think it's been a net gain. Now if only I could get the whole sys-admin team to use it. ;)
12 -
Imagine a "development" environment with no vcs, no APIs, no general hierarchy for db admin or software development, no test environment. Well this was my first job.
Quite literally a dumpster fire.
I know I'm not a world class developer but I still think this was beyond unacceptable for a software startup.2 -
How about incompetent management? Company absolutely murders any possible increase in productivity. Laptop provided? Slow as balls. Takes minutes to log in. I get a Mac for mobile development and that's OK. SSD and adequate memory but I'm primarily a .NET Dev. Can't get on the network with a virtual machine. They won't I stall even a managed image. So can't use databases because they're all AD authenticated. Got a virtual desktop environment and that sucks worse in performance than the laptop. Add the Assault on local administration rights and the monitoring software that constantly thrashers any memory and hard drive usage and im about to quit over all this... All this decided by a non developer and not asked for our opinions. Yay large Enterprises
-
Is it normal for the majority of the junior web developers to struggle with development environment settting? I am asking because I am struggling7
-
!rant
TL;DR: Can anyone recommend or point at any resources which deal with best practices and software design for non-beginners?
I started out as a self-taught programmer 7 years ago when I was 15, now I'm computer science student at a university.
I'd consider myself pretty experienced when it comes to designing software as I already made lots of projects, from small things which can be done in a week, to a project which i worked on for more than a year. I don't have any problems with coming up with concepts for complex things. To give you an example I recently wrote a cache system for an android app I'm working on in my free time which can cache everything from REST responses to images on persistent storage combined with a memcache for even faster access to often accessed stuff all in a heavily multithreaded environment. I'd consider the system as solid. It uses a request pattern where everthing which needs to be done is represented by a CacheTask object which can be commited and all responses are packed into CacheResponse objects.
Now that you know what i mean by "non-beginner" lets get on to the problem:
In the last weeks I developed the feeling that I need to learn more. I need to learn more about designing and creating solid systems. The design phase is the most important part during development and I want to get it right for a lot bigger systems.
I already read a lot how other big systems are designed (android activity system and other things with the same scope) but I feel like I need to read something which deals with these things in a more general way.
Do you guys have any recommended readings on software design and best practices?3 -
Finally did it, finally installed Ubuntu on my fucking desktop and the transition is not as bad as I thought. I just have to install my dev environments now. C, PHP, SQL, C# (.NET Core)6
-
After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...
So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.
Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.
Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.
Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...
So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.
Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).
We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).
I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...
Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks... -
After nearly 4 weeks, my account has finally been generated to access the VDIs for our development environment. I tried to authenticate with my smartcard and kept getting errors with very bland messages. after hours of digging through (useless) windows logs, someone told me that the certificate authority that signed my card isn't in the trust store for the VDI backend. Based on the current pace of things, I'm guessing it's going to be a while before this gets sorted out. My internship ends in 2 weeks and I haven't been able to do anything yet :/
-
Microsoft owed a lot of its product development to the VB language. VB6 made an acute impact in the dev world. With a RAD environment, a proper language that executes to the machine level. A good IDE etc etc.
VB.NET broke a lot of balls due to the fact that the .NET framework came to the world and C# became a special name in the .NET arsenal. for years, both languages were hand on hand. With a bunch of neckbeards hating on VB.NET and another group of neckbeards advocating for VB.NET to step in to their roots concerning the VB6 standard.
Fast forward and Microsoft is complete hating on VB.NET regarding the .net core environment.
This is for me the biggest hurdle with Microsoft technologies, while I love C#, I am very hesitant to trust in their technology stacks since they have a thing about ignoring things they developed. Remember Visual Fox Pro? ded, remember classic ASP with VBScript and JScript? dead
Shit like that makes me not trust Microsoft, F# is a fascinating language, but nothing stops me from believing they will discard it at one point or another.
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with VB.NET, I feel that the language is fucking easy to get, a glimpse of a VB.NET project and I know what is happening, the syntax, as verbose as it is, really makes it easy for anyone to follow along with it.
The problem? Because it is so easy to work with, most devs in that realm never bothered to move forward, which is why there are no big projects build with this language, as such, people coming forward as maintainers are rare, and few in between.
I just want to go back to the good ol days of RAD and for Embarcadero to get their heads out their ass and release Delphi for everyone. Object pascal is dummy easy.3 -
Ok, so I'm a student and in my free time, I mostly write a bit of python, C++ and a bit Haskell for fun...
I wanted to try out Android development now...
HOLY FUCKETY FUCK, THIS SHIT TAKES TIME!
most of the time, I get an idea, open vscode and start typing (maybe install some modules for like 10 minutes), not with this: Android studio took hours to download with all the needed SDKs and libraries, then I created a new empty(!) Activity, then fucking Gradle needs hours to get it fucking ready... On a fucking XPS 13 9370!
How do you guys cope with that waiting, does it scale that way to bigger projects?
I would call myself rather patient, but if I have an idea, I don't want to set up the most basic environment for 3 hours...
Man that shit is bulky...4 -
you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?
noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few
but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.
example.
if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.
and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.
if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.
i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.
there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?
the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.
and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.
everything is so backwards in this country.
people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'
or
'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'
or
'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'
its pretty gross as are these people
well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people
took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.
still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?
I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.
I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.
i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.
and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.
there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.
starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.
everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.
the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.
so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.
years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.
don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.
I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.
oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.8 -
When it comes to config files for any kind of application, I tend to make sure that I understand what each config does, and that for each environment, they have the correct settings.
However some of my co-workers don't bother understanding what the configs mean and so I have people copying and pasting config details from development environments into staging and production configs. They think that just changing hostnames is more than enough.
So they ended up wasting a good 3 hours trying to figure out why sessions were always invalidating and cached objects were not caching. I had a look at the config and realised their mistake in like 3 mins. -
Need some advice here.
So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.
I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.
I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.
Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.
In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.
I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.2 -
Recently I started to study app development (I am frontend/backend developer) and I noticed unlike when I was younger, I have a focus limit of about 6 hours. After 6 hours I become super distracted... I am slowly getting back to normal but recently I got so distracted I decided to play a breve game and which one better than half life alyx?
Well, if you have a vr headset play it: I swear I spent 2 hours just fucking around and looking at the environment... in one scene you enter a house and I went full detective trying to understand why the house was messed up: picked up stuff, looked in the corners and so on... it really gives you an impression of what vr could be4 -
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.
I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?
I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."1 -
Front-end web development is like a fucking cancer to me right now
I need the following behavior from my development environment if I don't want the webdev experience to destroy my sanity and tempt me into suicide by making me waste my valuable lifetime configuring shit that is ultimately meaningless to the software I'm trying to create:
- I should be able to open the webpage in the browser at localhost:<some-port>
- the page should refresh immediately as I save my files
- I should be able to import node modules installed with npm without using a script tag linking to some CDN (for instance, I want to do a get request with axios instead of the fetch API)
- I should be able to do this without spending more than two minutes reading the documentation for a tool that would enable me to do it, ideally without ever coming even close to touching a configuration file
Right now I know about browser-sync and webpack, or webpack-dev-server or some such fucking shit fuck fucking fuck.
browser-sync seems to fulfill most of these needs, except that I can't seem to bring npm modules into my application and import them. Webpack seems to be able to do this, but at the cost of slowly throwing my life away reading documentation for over-complicated configuration files that do not aid me in actual software creation and therefore do not interest me and never will, all in the hope that I *may* at some point dig out enough shit to find how to do such a use case (i.e. seamless, smooth web development) that to me feels reasonably common and expected.
Is there some tool that enables me to do *seamless*, pleasurable web development without the hassles of over-complication and over-engineering? Is there some hidden command for webpack that allows me to run such simple shit without ever needing to edit some pointless configuration file?
Please, I beg of you, let me know.8 -
#! usr/bin/rant
Our Entreprise CMS at work (obviously):
- inconsistent UI : check (misplaced buttons, some pages are more developed than others)
- slow: check (average 6 seconds of waiting, with cache)
- loading screen as page transitions covering the whole page, making it impossible to click somewhere else if mistaken, adding +3 seconds to loading : check
- time-based session, inlined in HTML and wildly disconnects you, making you lose all changes : check
- sometimes objects are inaccessible and can't do anything about it : check
- "delete" button next to "edit", delete is bigger and I have already clicked the delete button by accident : check
- can't have local development environment, need to work with integrated editor which has no helping features: check
- first TTFB: adds +2-6 seconds to loading time
TL;DR : a pleasant, developer-friendly, frustration- and rantless CMS to work with, reliable and fast. -
Make the development environment, the code base and the documentation cleaner for the new hires.
My predecessors copied whole repos without clean-up and doc and let me figure out what was working or not. They just 'made' it work. The CI process, if you can call it that, is unstable and overengineered as hell.
I don't want new hires to feel the same dread I did trying to repair other people's stack of mistakes.2 -
when the senior doesn't bother reading the issue you've discovered which is a legitimate issue and other team members encounter after pulling develop
instead they prescribe not helpful advice of resetting your entire development environment, which would've wasted time, effort and not been the most efficient way to fix the issue
thankfully you have the sense not to reset your entire environment
they then proceed to gaslight you
of course at the end of the day they dont acknowledge or can possibly fathom they fucked up and gave bad advice
looking for tips on how to be so zen you dont choose anger and how to reduce stress2 -
TL;DR: idiot 'team leader' does mindless merge to master. Precious time wasted in a high pressure deadline environment.
So, i work currently at one of Belgiums largest consulting company's at brussels airport, we are moving their analytics platform to the cloud.
We use puppet to manage the systems.
When i started i noticed immediately that their 'development workflow' is hardly to be named as such, because they simply change stuff directly on server , manual 'temporary' fixes everywhere, hardcoded stuff, non validated code... Basically the way one would develop in their garage, not in a consulting company as this one. But that is just the beginning.
A month ago i did a major effort to equalize all the discrepancies between the codebase and the server. Ensured entire codebase to be validated, syntax checked, parsed, tested... It works. A 'great codebase overhaul' commit was PR'ed to master and got merged.
Yesterday the team lead, i'll call him 'B-tard' from here on, has also 'equalized the discrepancies between codebase, server and the restnof the stale branches on the repo' . i was doing my other work on my branch so no fucks given. This is where i should have given some fucks.
Anyways, today. The day starts every day with merging the master branch into your working branh because you need the latest working codebase, right?
Wrong!
This fucking dipshit smug b-tard has done a mindless merge of the entire codebase, effectively removing ALL validated working code for provisioning servers. Control blocks, lookup functions, lambda's... Basically everything he did not understand.
At the same time the project is already way beyond the allotted budget in pkney and time, so there is a huge pressure to have a working 'production' environment TODAY!
THIS MOTHERFUCKING B-TARD JUST MADE THAT IMPOSSIBLE.
i'm loving this assignment, i'm loving the PM, the collegues, the environment, the location... everything. All but this fuckibg b-tard that somehow got his position by sucking dick or licking ass or both...
I wanna get out asap.
Oh... While typing this and arriving at the room of the office... It is locked, i have no key.
Fucking asshole!1 -
Working from development environment. New API module works like a charm.
Migrated to production. Whole CRM breakes down.
Migraine intensifies. -
I feel super discouraged. I just got a new job from being let go from my previous one, and I’m already thinking about quitting.
They really threw me into the weeds with a couple of complex tasks that require a lot of BE work and all I really do is FE. I’m still just trying to learn how the framework actually works. I think they expect me to become full stack. Now I find myself just starting at the computer screen most of the day because I have no fucking idea how to start working. The codebase and local environment is also fucked up super bad and barely runs on my machine.
Also, whenever I reach out these people they give the most minimal answers and have swollen egos. The frameworks they use have a really shitty community and bad documentation, so googling anything is really pointless. Working on this project, it has made me consider giving up development.
I am wondering if this is just a me thing though. Should I quit or stick with it for a bit?13 -
Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.
Subject: Pharo
Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.
Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.
Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.
We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny
Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.
Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.
Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.
I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.
I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.
Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.
For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.
Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.
There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.
Guess I really am a simple dude. -
How do you manage production, development and test environment in iOS/Xcode? Any good sources out there? 💻2
-
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD. -
A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.
So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)
First question was: What to build first?
The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.
We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.
By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.
Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.
Next step: Choosing a datastore
The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.
Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.
We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.
Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use
The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.
What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:
- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON
- Transform JSON to a desired output
- Respond with the transformed JSON
Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.
Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.
To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.
The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.
The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.
Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.
Many more headaches to come later this year ;)3 -
Friday: Run your security test on production after hours.
Saturday: Wait, do development instead.
Today: Ya know, development is a critical environment too. Just don't test anything at all.
🙄 -
Soo Guys,
I am thinking of a new Laptop for developing abroad. Also because my PC is to much power crunching.
I first thought of an MacBook. Thanks to my human intelligence I have thrown away this idea.
I may want to use an surface pro (not the beefiest one, just like i5, 8gb RAM and 265ssd) or an laptop with Linux flash.
Because I am used to develop in Windows environment I might choose the surface. I really love Linux but as I progress in my (jet many, but not enough) languages I might stay at windows.
I wouldn't choose any HP or Lenovo laptop any more, only bad experience.
What do you guys think? Any other opinions?
Edit: I want to use it for:
- WebDevelopment
- Java Application Development
- C#/C Development
- Server Development
- Game Development
- Network Adminstration
- Server Administration
- Some Random Stuff6 -
I have zero knowledge with Android development. I started to mess around with react Native these days. And so much time on configuring the environment of everything... Emulator, SDK, ADV... Still doesn't work... Spending hours and days waiting for a miracle. And then the emulator launched. Thanks God.
7 -
Wouldn't say it was upsetting so much as mind-bending...
Attended an interview with a mid-size web development agency in 2017. The recruiter fed back from this agency that the interviewers didn't think I'd had enough experience of an agency environment. I'd spent six years in the industry at this point, and five and a half of those years were in agencies. The recruiter was as mystified as I was over that one. -
I'm given a simple assignment to update email templates. I tot it would be a breeze.
It turn out SURPRISE! After the updating of template is done. I deploy the code in the development environment.
I tried to access the email template like how the user will see to verify all is good. It turn out i am facing error.
So uhh ok, i went to check the logs to see what the hiccups. It turn out that a table is missing. But this is production code. So my question how the hell did the production environment has the table but dev don't.....6 -
Hi Guys,
As you have seen this week again we have a problem with data imports from <tool 1> and <tool 2>. Clearly the existing setup is not working. We are now encouraging more and more people from the project to start using our portal and we need a stable and up to date environment.
Can we have a call please to discuss the following topics:
1. Portal data integrity
2. SLAs
3. Project Communication
4. Development efficiency
Thanks
<Drama Queen PM>1 -
A shitty platform that, although open source, there is no clearly documented way of setting a development environment for it. This pile of crap states clearly that it does NOT support RTL languages. One of the core business requirements is Arabic support. What to do? Look for other platforms? WRONG!
Base the fucking business on it and ask ME to see why the SQL database is not encoding the Arabic characters correctly and to look into the logs that back-end puked. My expertise is mobile development anyways damnit. Sure the backend code is Java code (Java jokers and haters, not the appropriate place) and I know it but there is no fucking way to test that motherfucker or to build it! No fucking testing server can be made! Only instructions to get a Docker image pulled and set up.
FML.
"This company is a fucking م."
I cannot believe I am so frustrated that I am ending this rant with a fun puzzle.
Hints to help you decipher the quoted sentence:
Hint 1: That Arabic letter is the perfect letter.
Hint 2: You don't need to be an Arab to understand what it means.6 -
I'm fucking Paralyzed and I need some advice.
I want to be an entrepreneur.
Not just an entrepreneur but a DAMN good one.
I self-studied business, economics, physics, self-taught multivariable calculus, teaching myself chemistry too.
But I haven't even started my career and I just graduated from University.
Right now I'm starting simple and just doing a few web development things.
But, I want to go deeper into a subject that hasn't really had its problem solved yet.
A.I. can sell you neat things, but it can't kill misinformation (yet).
Graphics are an integral part to gaming, but GPUs are the second greatest threat to our environment behind commercial jets.
Do I HAVE to choose between A.I. and graphics?!14 -
To add a bit more context to my last rant.
The following situation happened today and similar situations are at the moment common as fuck.
Situation started roughly 1 1/2 months ago as a deployment failed.
Seemed to be a DNS problem for the devs, so my basic assumption was that they checked their shit.
As I was and I am currently more than swamped, told them it had to wait if it is an DNS issue...
Well.
Backstabbing product manager complained to upper management as it took so long.
Backstabbing manager even went so far to propose alternative solutions - think of switching product to work around issue and throwing away a year of development of a 5 man team...
So additional to my work I had to deescalate and prevent complete nonsense.
Today I finally found time for the problem.
After 2-3 hours of turning every stone inside the DNS setup, cloudflare, loadbalancers, etc...
Well. Devs. Don't trust them.
Turned out the devs misconfigured the environment entirely.
Its not so obvious in this product as it is rather complicated, though the devs documentation explicitly mentioned that if one overrides the configuration for e.g. several languages, one has to make sure to set two env variables for TLS mode...
There was only one set.
:(
8 fucking weeks of backstabbing and blaming others while they could have just read their own fucking documentation and fixed that shit in 5 minutes.2 -
Being a full stack developer within a company that has separated departments for each stack can be very frustrating, especially when it comes to just a development environment.
Although my main role is a backend PHP developer, there are times where I need to configure or install something in a development server. But I have to put in a request to the networking team every time I want something done. Personally I find this to be very inefficient and wasting my time and the networking teams' time as well.
An example would be I want to install Supervisor to have a process restart in the event that it dies, which I explained to the networking guy. But the networking guy says that they don't want to install it, can just make a systemd service instead. I said that is fine and asked if he could do that or can I do it myself. Then he wants to know why I want to have a systemd service installed even though I just explained it to him!
Though I guess I'm always going to have this kind of issue with networking teams.1 -
What (realistic) requirements would you need to run windows 10pro OS with kali linux on a VM for pentest/ coding environment ONLY. no gaming etc. ?
Im starting my software development school soon, and im needin a new laptop.
Any requirements/ good to know appreciated from you old time code gods5 -
Setup SSH keys from your Dev machine to every development environment then configure a putty profile to use that key with your login.
-
How do you guys separate your working environments for different projects?
My situation is that I have one gaming project which requires having Windows OS (for testing purposes since can't run that game on Linux or Mac OS)
Then I have 2-3 other projects (freelancing/fulltime gigs) which don't require Windows so I use macbook for them.
Then I have other projects for my freetime (self development and stuff) and also need an environment just to be able not to work and chill instead
I tried separating these concerns with using tools such as evernote, trello and etc. but it's really getting out of hand.
Using different users for Win/Mac is not an option since I dont want to be switching between different users all the time.
Should I consider using some VM's to have my working environments for different projects separate? Will I use performance when using these VM's?
Buying 5 laptops just to separate everything doesnt make sense as well.6 -
Haven't done much work on my game since December. Ok so I havent done anything on my game since December. Learned Mockito and JUnit formally (finally) because that's what we'll be using at work.
Never really learnt unit testing prior, just knew it's power. I just need to find the right unit testing and mocking frameworks that work well with .net, C# and Unity3D and I'll be great.
I'll finally attempt to properly test that (those) annoying part(s) of my game. So many vectors to work out and often the object is moved to or along the wrong vector.
I'd always only imagined having to use stubs which is why I've never understood how unit testing would really help in such a dynamic environment as video game development. Especially as a one man team. Mocking is about to be my lifesaver.
Anyone able to suggest a good testing and/or mocking framework for C#, .Net, Unity3D? -
Also focus more on how to deal with the business side of product development, how to 'deal' with sales/operations in a professional environment.
During my education the focus was mainly on the pure software engineering side, not so much on the 'real world environments'.
Personally I have no problems dealing with other departments, but some of my colleagues do struggle with the daily 'confrontations' between product development and operations. -
Do you think that's a good idea to work with 4 developers on a shared development server without functional or technical specs and versioning software or testing methods/environment?
Just asking for a friend, not for my future employer...2 -
I like docker. I think the technology is cool and I have a few ideas on how I can use it. But I sometimes think I'm too stupid to use it.
I'm currently trying to convert parts of my dev environment to use containers. But following tutorials on it confuses me and I get lost with it really quickly and get discouraged for a few days until I give it another try and fail again
Like fuck I already know I'm mediocre but this makes me feel like i should go into a manual labor field instead of software development6 -
Which skills and platform do I need to focus as a ASP.NET back end developer? The .NET development environment is so massive, I really don't know from where do I need to start. I do know basic C# syntax and was studying C# 7.0 in a Nutshell and stopped temporarily because it introduced too much concept that I don't need for now. Any advice will be appreciated. Thank you!4
-
for the 3rd time ive tried introducing some version control on a project that really needs it because it has multiple people working on it.
And because the last time my efforts got shut down because in practice people thought it was too much of a hassle to develop locally rather than on the shared development server directly, I made a feature that would let people checkout branches on said server...
Apparently the action of; saving > committing > pushing to your feature branch > merge after aproval, is still too much for people to comprehend; "I think this is too convoluted can't we just keep pushing to the production server to check our work and then commit and push to the master branch"
So I just got pissed and said fuck it, no more git then, I'm not even going to put any effort into changing tooling here anymore, and this is a massive project where we have to manually remove code that isnt ready yet from the staging environment.
Are the people I'm working with just this stupid or am I really overengineering this solution because I think 4 people should not be working on the same file at the same time without any form of version control and just direct upload to FTP.
(and yes, I know I should leave this job already, but social anxiety of starting at a new company is a big obstacle for me)3 -
Task on freelancer : There are (too) many adblocker detection plugins. I want you to select one, test it at your local development environment (we will not provide) that it does the following:
- reliably discovers an AdBlocker
- does not interfere with regular ad serving (AdSense) if no AdBlocker is installed at user's browser
****- shows alternate banners (coming from our servers, so they look like regular pictures instead) even when AdBlocker is active *******
OKAY Now reality was that pre thought, pondered by PM ?
anyway adblocks seems doing Acceptable ads* which might be payed for ;)1 -
So we now do continuous deployment to a development environment. Once a PR gets merged it gets deployed there. We then have to manually deploy to staging every so often.
We did this because QA wined that the Dev was constantly breaking Staging, when we contentiously deployed to that.
So now we have a staging instance that is always behind. Which isn't big deal, because its supposed to be stable right?
Well now the stupid fucking QA team is always making mountains of tickets and noise for stuff that is already fixed on the development instance.
Fucking shit that they message me about, or have to call me about. "Hey let me tell me about this thing I found." And then I'm like I already fixed that thing last week.
So it seems to be wasting everyone time to not just CDCI into staging. I have to wait weeks to retest my bugs on staging. To make sure that some other stupid fuckeshir on my team didn't undo or break my fucking fix. Shit keeps getting kicked out of QA Review. Fuck. lol.
Then there like I can update the thing on the database through the front end tool. Well tough shit buddy, your going to have to wait a week unti next staging deployment to see if that tool is fixed. This is your fault for fucking up our pure CDCI with your ideas. Now everything takes longer for everyody.
To sum things up. Some dumb bug makes it into the manual staging deployment and gets fixed an hour later. Doesn't get deployed until next fucking week. QA makes a bunch of noise about it. A thing that is fixed and in the pipe-line.
Also a dumb fucking bug will make it into staging, lets say a critical front-end back office tool that needs to send numbers to the backend, they send a fucking string instead of a number and break it. Now we have to redeploy the tool and backend to staging because there related. Then if we deploy backend we have to deploy the client facing site too. since it also depends on backend.
Its a fucking hassle.
Now if the fucking DevOps guy could do his job, and make a god-damn deploy button for all the staging servers that would be great.1 -
ci tools in cooperation with git servers because i work on different machines and only one of them has the full development environment. (every other machine has only an editor (atom or vi) and git when it comes to dev tools)
-
Why does the Android development environment keeps resetting? It’s been three times now. Pinche Android castroso de cagada 😒😒😒😒😒😒😒😒2
-
Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.
That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.
Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.
Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.
That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic
Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.
It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.
In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.
If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.
For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.
The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.
Good luck!6 -
So the first 3 hours at work on a Monday have been spent giving technical support to fellow co-workers on THEIR OWN local development environment. I have no idea how they've set everything up but they want me to fix their VM's.
-
Don't you just love the mystery bugs in the development environment. The ones that just appear without any reason like software updates etc. and are usually fixed by just sitting and waiting. It's like spending the whole work day with a crappy magician!2
-
If your code is giving HTTP 500 error on a production server, go kill yourself, until you are having a development environment on the production server. In that case, kill your manager! 💢
-
For those using Windows 11. How's it been as a development environment/base OS? Any temptations to switch to Linux? I've been seeing a good number of web developers on Twitter make the jump so I thought I'd ask.
18 -
Hee guys I will be running Ubuntu/Debian as my main development environment. Which distro is the best for development with k8s, docker and elixir?
Thanks for in the input guys! Really appreciate it!12 -
Hey guys, I'm planning to install a Linux in my machine. I have used Ubuntu, debian and fedora before. Which Linux distro would be best to use? I'll be using the environment for development. Looking for lightweight, fast Linux distro. Please suggest.17
-
Was in a job colleague (just to bridge some time till i started my first apprenticeship). Got to play around with the Borland c++ environment... Went to the bookstore and bought a Introduction into C development book
-
Some Back Story
Hey, so i was hired as a graduate developer in a company recently, its a rotation kinda thing so we get to work in different roles. At the moment i am in performance testing (which i like), here i am learning a lot of new things and like the working environment as well. After sometime i will have the freedom to choose a different role to move to but it is restricted to back-end mostly (that's what i went for during the interview) so i will have a choice between software engineering and QA automation, i can try both for sometime and then i will have to decide which part suits me more. Of course they will take my word but also take into account where i suit more according to my performance and factors like some others preferring the same thing.
Problem
Problem is that i have very limited knowledge of performance testing as a career simply because i think most people would prefer Development over testing, but this is a different kind of testing which i actually like. I just want to know if i have this choice then which career path makes more sense as i applied as a developer only but being a newbie i didn't know there were these many categories. A senior developer i know advised me to get all the knowledge i can take from performance but still go with software engineering and didn't explain his rational.
just want some advice for a newbie, i love the workplace.2 -
The worst part about writing JS is not having a reliable development environment. I have literally had three different outputs for THE SAME FUCKING CODE! <sarcasm> It's almost like they are not even complete or something </sarcasm> FML3
-
I (frontend) was given 2 weeks to develop a new feature of the app. Almost after the end of 1 week, backend guy was finished with his code , with still bugs pending. Since backend wasn't ready for most part of the development process, I was working on my part, basically creating functionality and created views using the UI guys wireframes.
Now, we were on a time crunch , I didn't got enough time to improve the wireframes or to work with the UI guy . I released on staging environment and no one liked the UI.
App feature was supposed to be released on Tuesday. Shit hit the fan and i had to create a new ui, code the new parts of the app, do shit ton of other work and extending the deadline to today.
As of now backend code is still not fully functional,
app is ready but edge cases still not tested and I have to pull an all nighter to finish this fucking piece of shit.2 -
I'm kind of lost guys 🤔(from the point of view of the career path).
Currently I'm unemployed and looking around for a new job inside and outside Italy, but most of them are quiet mediocre, from the point of view of salary(is hard to reach 40K pre-tax in Italy) or actual interesting work to do.
Leaving that aside, up to now I was always able to deal with any job that I had at hand, despite the industry, and this leaves me with an empty goal in the software development career because I feel capable to adapt to any technical environment.
The business side was always a second thought because it's quite boring most of the times(but I might change mind I think, given the chance).
And if you ask me what I like, I would say anything technically interesting/challenging, so no real preference here 😕
Have you ever had such period in your career?
Did you get the chance to find a way to move on?1 -
I just got into a project that uses GWT (in an attempt to rebuild it in React). Is it me or is Java development environment stuck in early 2000s?6
-
I wish there is an open source alternative to forge or serverpilot. Not to use on production servers but for local development environment.
Yes, I'm not a command line person.4 -
Linux: sudo apt-get install IDE dev-libs etc
Windows: install wxMSW, extract compressed binaries, set environment variables, set preprocessor/project settings in VS2017, set search directories, etc.
Why is it so ANNOYING to set up a simple GUI development library for C++ on Windows? -
1) After many years of development the thing that grew the most is my capability to troubleshoot much more easily most issues, both physical or virtual, with greater enjoyment from such accomplishments.
2) The power to create something from nothing is a great feeling, especially if you keep on personal projects and most of your dev passion you keep it outside the working environment.
3) Career paths can easily be opened in case you live development as an infinite cycle of adaptation and improvement. -
This post is going to be long and it might not be the platform to ask for it's mainly for ranting yet I wanted to ask a non toxic community.
I'm mainly an ABAP programmer working on an SAP system for my living. No matter how people inside the SAP sphere look at it, it's not exactly cutting edge technology in the world of software development. (and in my opinion it's not even a knife)
As I work in an enterprise environment I have trouble about finding gaps where I can learn newer technologies and thus, I've decided to learn in my free time.
I tend to tilt toward web development as do many I know because I see potential in the GUI which HTML and CSS achieve. And I do believe that combining that with languages such as JS, Python, Ruby, Erlang and Elixir can give way to a healthy experience both in Web development and even desktop development.
In order to avoid overwhelming myself I wish to start with learning web development. Time is not of the essence because I plan to continue working with ABAP for close future, around the next 2 years, and I'm young.
I wanted to ask the community, is there any developer in here that was in the same position and can give out some pointers to the path they took? Is it wise to start my path from HTML5 and CSS3 without looking back to the older ways? Any resource you'd share will be welcomed.1 -
What's the most sensible way to build and use 32/64-bit libraries with MSYS on Windows? Specifically, I am wondering about zlib and libpng along with SDL2.
I know there are pre-built versions available, but I am inevitably going to need to build other libraries in future.
I'm expecting things to go into /usr/local (which they do), but I'd like to have separate builds for 32-bit and 64-bit. I know I can put things into "lib32" or "lib64" using ./configure options pretty easily, but DLLs (e.g. SDL) seem to end up in "bin" so I assume I should create a "bin32" and "bin64" for those?
Then there's the issue of e.g. libpng not being able to find zlib's headers when using its MSYS makefile... Should I be editing these makefiles? It looks as though I should (things are commented-out etc.) but when I want to update to a newer version, I'll need to modify the makefile again.
It probably sounds like a really silly set of questions but I've always found that building and installing libraries on Windows feels really clumsy and I just want to make sure I'm not making a really messy dev environment.
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View