Python. Ok, so it's a really cool language, as a scripting language it's awesome, quick to write.

When it's been used to make full fledged oop programs that you suddenly have to maintain things like duck typing become problematic. Looking at an object fuck knows what methods are available. Worse still when some bastard that thinks he's being clever doesn't bother declaring any object attributes and instead overrides the __set_attr method to dynamically add them as they are used there is no hope for the poor sod that has to maintain it later.

I've also now worked out I'm at least the 3rd person having been given the task of maintaining it, i spent a day changing CLI options wondering why they didn't do anything but occasionally crash the app. I've now found a few thousand lines deep that someone had hard-coded these values because they couldn't work out where to get the CLI args from!

I've gained a new appreciation for nominative, strictly typed languages.

I don't use rubber duck debugging method. I use the "I really need the money" debugging method.
Works perfectly!

When I get stuck I usually try a variant of the duck method. I find someone not involved the project and explain my problem to them. I always figure it out before I finish explaining

TL;DR: Google asked me to PROVIDE a phone number to verify connection from a new device, on the said device.

Yesterdayto log into my work Google account from my personal laptop to check emails, calendars update and so on. I opened up a private navigation window, went to Google sign-in page, entered my credentials, all is well.

Google then decided to "verify it's me" and prompted me to PROVIDE a phone number (work account without work phone means no phone number set up) so that they can send a verification code to the number I just provided to make sure the connection is legit.

Didn't want to do that, clicked "use another method" and got asked to fill the last password I remember, which would be my current password thanks to my trusty password manager. After submitting, I'm prompted with an error saying I have to contact my admin to reset my password because they can't log me in with my CURRENT password.

I ain't gonna do that, so went back to login page, provided my phone number, got the code, filled in the code, next thing I know I'm browsing through my emails.

What the duck? Could have been anybody giving any phone number. So much for extra security.

Also don't care that they have my phone number, the issue is more about the way used to obtain it: locking me out of my account and having no other way of logging in.

I have noticed I have had great success using another co-worker as a metaphorical rubber duck (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally). It improves my productivity vastly. However, I know that it probably distracts others when I am using them in that way.

That's why I want to buy a literal rubber duck and talk to it. I could do it very quietly and most of my close co-workers use noise-cancelling headphones 80% of time while sitting at their desks. My only concern is other people passing by my desk would think that I am weird. My desk is in an open space and several people pass by it every hour. (however on my floor besides developers we have HR, marketing and people from high up who might be unfamiliar with the rubber duck method).

Is it unprofessional to talk to a rubber duck at the office?

On the days when I just want to sob and put my head through the monitor....

I get out a piece of paper and draw my processes (whether that be code or mapping etc). Each step of each process, helps to represent the input and output of each method.

This makes it easier to find which step isn't giving the desired output....

Either this or the rubber duck method. :)

Captains Log:

Day 2 of trying to get SQL database to work with JDBC application.

I've built a try/catch method and it throws up the message that IntelliJ can't find the JDBC driver.

More research to be done. My first officer duck buddy has no input for me.

It's going to be a long day.

I've been dreaming about an eat() method in, I guess, Javascript. It would accept a string as parameter and set the cursor position further by the width of that string in the current font and size without displaying the string. A bit like a span with FG == BG.
But the best was the debug mode: the characters would be printed, but a yellow duck would appear from the left and eat them in Pacman style.

devRant because...rubber duck method

Anyone else use a rubber debugging duck or similar method?

If you don't know what it is, you talk to something explaining your code line by line. The best thing I can think to compare it to is when an artist flips their linework around to see the anatomy mistakes. It forces your brain to look at it from an outside perspective

Who else finds HTML/CSS to be just plain bad?

since that's what the web adopted, apparently no matter what you are developing if it involves a GUI then the design method almost always follows in the same path as the web.

that's not the issue though, the real problem is that the web adopted a very horrible way to create a UI, while HTML might have been fine for 90s-style websites I just feel like its a very lousy way to create a modern interactive webapp UI, its just very painfully obvious that it wasn't designed for that purpose. remind me again what HTML stands for? "HyperText Markup Language" yea that sounds about right. and CSS really doesn't help but double down on the flaws of HTML.

on a whim I can come up with a better method:
instead of the weird <body><footer> structure, why not have say "objects that flow in a 2D space", you define the parameters location and dimension of these objects, with something like javascript they interact with each other and just like div in HTML objects contain smaller objects.

this makes a lot more sense than the footer/body design or the obviously duck-taped attempts at controlling the style in CSS, like flow, and absolute-position.

am I alone in this?