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
-
I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.
When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!
I found Rust intimidating.
I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.
Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.
Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.
Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.
Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.
Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.
Moral of the story:
Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.
Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.
Reading code is better than reading documentation.
Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.
Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.
Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.
Just get your fucking hands dirty!12 -
I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.
I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.
“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”
Jesus fucking christ.31 -
Sometimes dirty code is more efficient than clean code.
If features get dropped frequently and requirements change every few days, writing best-practices, tested code is wasted time. Learned that in my first job where I thought the other devs were all bad. Until I realized their bad code pays my salary, and my clean code takes more time to develop.6 -
Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.
Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.
What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.
Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck
We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.
By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.
In a department wide meeting:
DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"
Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.
Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."
Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.6 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.
Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.
Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.
One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.
Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)
VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).
Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.
Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.
The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.
Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.
About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.
MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"
Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.
WTF!
I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.
She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)
MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."8 -
HAHA FUCK YOU HR RECRUITER!!
This fucking lady tries to steal my devs while i spent a lot of blood sweat and tears raising them.
Thankfully my devs are happy with their work type, salary, and conditions. So they showed me a screenshot of her phishing attempts.
There is so much damage I can do to her, and her company as i got all the information, its very tempting.
Since its a "common" dirty and distasteful move, the most sensible course of action I can think of is public shaming. That too is common, dirty and distasteful. But im not that kind of guy.
What do you guys think, should i suck it in and let it slide or public shame her for her actions?3 -
Many "purists" love to piss on JavaScript and web development. And to an extent I can understand ostream’s frustration with these people.
It’s easy to criticize because yes: many web projects are indeed shit.
But I’d like to argue that the reason why so many of these projects are crappy is because of bad management:
- unrealistic deadlines
- no clear testing strategy
- or no testing at all because of deadlines
- no time allotted to catch up on technical debt
- etc.
This type of management is far more commonplace in web projects because things need to get delivered quickly and if they’re delivered with bugs, it’s no big deal as lives aren’t at stake.
I doubt this type of management is tolerated in projects where you’re working on software for welding machines (for example), where the stakes are that "you’re expected not to kill anyone" (to quote demolishun)
So in these types of projects, management can’t tolerate anything much below perfection and thus has to adapt by setting realistic deadlines that take into account the need for quality processes and thorough testing.
If this type of management was more common in web development, I can guarantee that web applications would be much more reliable and of better quality.
I can also guarantee that poorly managed non-web projects as outlined above would be just shitty as many web products.
My point being that’s it’s really DUMB to criticize fellow devs that work with web technologies on the basis that the state of websites/web apps is a mess. It just so happens that JS is the language of the web and that the web is where things are expected to be delivered quickly (and dirty … but we can fix it later mentality)
Stop acting like you’re the elite. I have no doubt you’re super smart and great at what you do. So be smart all the way and stop criticizing us poor webdevs that have to live with the sad state of affairs. ❤️38 -
So I work at a startup working on “cutting edge” technology with two other devs. Our lead engineer is an interesting fellow. The guy never ever writes a single line of code, just looks for similar projects online and receives a lot of credit for it, I have to hand it to him though, he has an ability to scheme through information and pick the gist of what’s going on but when it comes to detail, he’s seriously lacking. We recently started a projects a couple of weeks back and it was supposed to be an easy two days of hacking and we would be done but instead the guy looks for code online copies it I change the necessary variables to match the use case then it doesn’t work. So we’ve spent weeks debugging this code because someone is afraid to get their hands dirty. I can’t complain to the bosses because they’re not techies and the trust him more since I’m still new to the company.
I love their attitude though, they honestly believe they have a chance against some giants in tech and from the actual talent I’ve witnessed they’ll only get there through sheer luck.
I have to sit there and listen to them shit on more successful tech companies and that they have better ideas.
Maybe someone can change my mind on this issue as I’m still young and new to this industry.8 -
def best and worst dev experience from 2016 was a 4 week advanced dev boot camp for work. it was a smaller classroom with about 20 experienced devs in it. it was bright in there. a lot of strong minds backed by strong opinions and even loud voices at times, these are devs after all(so picture that for 1 month straight, 8 hr days). first 2 weeks was all new stuff. it was like a waterfall on head. I kept getting paired with weakest person in the camp for the weekly clone projects which didn't help matters for me or her. after the second week I started to grasp what we were doing and they started mixing up the groups. by the last week most everyone in the camp had learned so much, we had come so far we all kinda bonded through the experience. the final projects Imo were all very impressive. we were all pretty proud of ourselves I'd say. I never learned so much in such a short period of time. immersive training is the only way to go. those week long standard lecture lab workbook tech training courses are weak!! u wanna learn something, u gotta get in there and get dirty with it.1
-
Not fair! How come Apache gets its modsecurity module pre-compiled and available in public repositories, but Nginx hides it behind a paywall of their "Plus" package/version?
Ugh... At least they provide the module's source, so one can compile and deploy it by himself...6 -
I am in no way a senior dev, in skill or compensation. I have completely inherited all rank and responsibility from all the folks who came before me and got canned.
For the last year, I have led and managed a team of juniors working on the only application making my company any money, while everyone else has been building new shit from scratch; every day my only two goals are to impart my team with as much knowledge as I possibly can give them, and to keep production from blowing up.
Until now, I've apparently kept everyone in the dark about the fact that I'm just skating by by "going with it" and able to google the answers just before they can ask the question. But now that the pandemic has hit, all future projects are put on hold indefinitely, and the company is pivoting all other devs under me. Now we have "true" seniors ripping the app apart and injecting code without thinking once to actually read the code base and analyze how the application was designed to work, because they are under orders from our serial entrepreneur of a CEO to "get it done, quick and dirty" and meanwhile as the app further destabilizes, the c-suite team looks to me.
So half the time I have no clue what I'm doing, but I can't let them know that. I mean at least I'm still gainfully employed, I still make way more than I ever did before in my life. I'm *reasonably* happy with what I do for a living. And if they can me, the company will be dead in the water, because I'm the only dev who understands intimately how to change the system and add new features without completely bricking it.
Am I doing it right, or nah?2
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View