Things I wish I could tell my 18 year old self.

1) Accept you will make mistakes.
2) Truly learn the language you are using.
3) Write idiomatic code for the language you are using.
4) Be upfront about not knowing something.
5) Don't let not knowing something stop you from learning it.
6) None of us knew X until we learned it.
7) Understand your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, play to them.
8) Be willing to try new things.
9) X language isn't ALWAYS the best choice, X paradigm isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Choose wisely.
10) You won't know everything, but you might know more than others.
11) Your ideas and ego don't matter more than ensuring the product works.
12) "Perfection is the enemy of the good [enough]" - Voltaire
13) "Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to remove." - Einstein.
14) Conflicts happen, deal with it.
15) Develop a toolset and really learn them.
16) Try new tools, they may prove better than what you were using.
17) Don't manage your own memory unless you absolutely have to, you are probably not smarter than the collective intelligence of the team that built the various garbage collection methods.
18) People can be dicks, especially online.
19) If you are new and people are being dicks to you, did you skip past the irc message about etiquette? If you did, you're the dick in this situation.
20) It can be tough, but it is fun, so have fun!

Fuck the incompetent and "pretentious psuedo devs" !!

I have been developing a web portal for a student club for this really big company (as intern) and then they assign this fuckin group of these 4 stupid intern devs to work with me !

The fuckin tweked my code and redirected the CONTACT FORM to the fuckin LOGIN CONTROLLER !!

Then these sons of Einstein inserted dummy users without a username and password into the fuckin production site !!

Now each fukin time someone submits contact form is redirected into some random user account !!

Who the fuck needs Hackers when we have these legendary coders -_-

Fuck this completely abysmal CMS!!!!
Not even god damn Einstein would be smart enough to understand this stinky pile of legacy code!
No, it's not enough to write an HTML template in PHP with less than 500 lines of code, noooooo, every god damn template HAS TO BE AT LEAST 3000 FUCKING LINES OF CODE WITH RANDOM INCLUDES EVERYWHERE!!!
Every fucking thing I fix spawns at least 2 new bugs! I FUCKING CAN'T!!!
I swear, if I meet these fucking worms of developers... someone will eat fresh turds mixed with puke from a highway toilet!

Einstein supposedly has a quote attributed to him: "Perfection isn't achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."

I find that I aggressively refactor code where I can to only what is absolutely required. It does also have the knock on effect of reducing scope of bugs, when the code is smaller there's only so many places bugs can be.

Tesla claimed to have the ability to create designs in his head and only built things once he was satisfied that it worked in theory first, now it's rare I can do that, but I will use a repl to prototype or test modules in isolation before just hacking on the actual code.

Jobs, I mean, I know he didn't code but he was always insisting on designs that looked good and was generally uncompromising in his design centric view.

My friend, she was my Starbucks barista for a while but I've slowly been teaching her code and she's taught me a lot about how to teach others to code, she also happens to be my favourite student.

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

In flutter , there’s something called TextButton.icon. Which render a button look like this :

(👍🏼 Like Button)

But there’s this tiny twat decided to use countless of nested column in a nested row and containers just to create a fucking button! This particular class contains 1438 lines of code! Most of the code are redundant and nested fucking shit.

I want to punch this guy so hard but I do not intend to start a ww3 with china.

That means I have no choice but refactor it as I implement a feature requested by the product team, every components break. It is like a land mine field here. One changes , the entire application crash.

So there are useless mother fucking Sherlock fucking holmes kept telling me that “don’t worry about refactoring now , just complete the task.” , like seriously “how in the name of mother fucking god of all arseholes can I complete my task when I can’t change even one component?”

These people are fucking genius. Their intelligence resurrected Einstein and made him die the second time.

I think I have PHPTSD...
This absolutely abysmal custom PHP CMS I have to migrate is even worse than I expected. At this point it's easier to guess the table relationships in MySQL than trying to decypher the code which that other company's CEO and his slaves wrote.

I have to assume that he is an absolute genius, well above 180 IQ points, as I have zero chance of understanding his code within my limited lifetime...

This aesthetics in physics that is hard to explain to someone outside the field. How beautiful for example that you can express the whole classical mechanics in just 1 equation and electro magnetism in 4, that sense of symmetry and clarity they express. Essentially in what Einstein and others believed: that the universe is a orderly place not chaos and that its rules can be understood by our crippled minds.
And I think there is a similar notion in code. As physicists are driven to more general and powerful theories that shall some time explain all interactions of matter that we know of, programmers, I believe, strive for similar ideals: brevity, conciseness, generality, abstraction, powerfulness of your symbolic system - one line of code to end it all.