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Search - "elegant code"
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Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.
As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.
You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.
You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.
You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.
In other words:
Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.
Thanks.62 -
So I told my wife one week ago: "Yeah, you should totally learn to code as well!"
Yesterday a package arrived, containing a really beautiful hardcover book bound in leather, with a gold foil image of a snake debossed into the cover, with the text "In the face of ambiguity -- Refuse the temptation to guess" on it.
Well, OK, that's weird.
My wife snatches it and says: "I had that custom made by a book binder". I flip through it. It contains the Python 3.9 language reference, and the PEP 8 styleguide.
While I usually dislike paper dev books because they become outdated over time, I'm perplexed by this one, because of how much effort and craftsmanship went in to it. I'm even a little jealous.
So, this morning I was putting dishes into the dishwasher, and she says: "Please let me do that". I ask: "Am I doing anything wrong?"
Wife responds: "Well, it's not necessarily wrong, I mean, it works, doesn't it? But your methods aren't very pythonic. Your conventions aren't elegant at all". I don't think I've heard anyone say the word "pythonic" to me in over a decade.
And just now my wife was looking over my shoulder as I was debugging some lower level Rust code filled with network buffers and hex literals, and she says: "Pffffff unbelievable, I thought you were a senior developer. That code is really bad, there are way too many abbreviated things. Readability counts! I bet if you used Python, your code would actually work!"
I think I might have released something really evil upon the world.29 -
A year ago I would have said:
"Because I love solving logic puzzles, there's no greater joy than finding a very simple, elegant translation of a user's requirements into code"
Then 2020 came. I'm SO FUCKING FED UP with coworkers and managers who miss all the required competence to organize and communicate about projects as they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of working from home.
I'm quite sure I'm the last one to give up at my work.
The company chat has completely died down. I've tried setting up meetings, but even my bosses show up irregularly, confused about why I'm calling them in the middle of their Netflix marathon.
So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. My answer is now:
"I'm a developer because I get nearly 6 figures, for going through my Steam Library while completely shitfaced at 11AM. When I sober up in the afternoon, I work on some hobby projects. I get to spend 500/m on ordering sandwiches"8 -
I wrote a piece of code. A logic. My senior changed it. And.. I am glad she did.
My descriptive variables and her conditional breakup of logic made up for a very beautiful piece of code. Simple and elegant. So much so that it makes total sense without any need of a comment.
Never thought I would be loving a 5-lines code piece this much.
This is one of those days when collaboration happens for the betterment.
Simply. Beautiful.4 -
I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...
#1 - Most expensive lesson learned
Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.
This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...
After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.
Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.
#2 - Hardest to find
This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.
Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.
#3 - Most elegant fix
Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.
My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.
So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.1 -
“Yes Haskell is my favorite language, so elegant yet so powerful, a pure form of expression of my complex thoughts”
*proceeds to code nothing but crappy hacky CRUDs in php5.4 for five years straight* -
The moment when all your tests cases for the first assignment of the term pass, your code is refactored and have adequate comments but you only get a 52/100 because your marker says your code is not "elegant enough" as a feedback.
Yeah, those were his exact words with no specific context or reasons. He didn't even explain when I went to him for explanations. I don't mind a bad grade, I could be wrong and that is fine.
#rantend13 -
I wish all newbies would read clean code. I feel if you understand the concepts you can more easily join an established team and contribute more quickly with less do overs. I realize writing elegant, testable code is like making good whiskey. It takes time.5
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Consumers ruined software development and we the developers have little to no chance of changing it.
Recently I read a great blog post by someone called Nikita, the blog post talks mostly about the lack of efficiency and waste of resources modern software has and even tho I agree with the sentiment I don't agree with some things.
First of all the way the author compares software engineering to mechanical, civil and aeroespacial engineering is flawed, why? Because they all directly impact the average consumer more than laggy chrome.
Do you know why car engines have reached such high efficiency numbers? Gas prices keep increasing, why is building a skyscraper better, cheaper and safer than before? Consumers want cheaper and safer buildings, why are airplanes so carefully engineered? Consumers want safer and cheaper flights.
Wanna know what the average software consumer wants? Shiny "beautiful" software that is either dirt ship or free and does what it needs to. The difference between our end product is that average consumers DON'T see the end product, they just experience the light, intuitive experience we are demanded to provide! It's not for nothing that the stereotype of "wizard" still exists, for the average folk magic and electricity makes their devices function and we are to blame, we did our jobs TOO well!
Don't get me wrong, I am about to become a software engineer and efficient, elegant, quality code is the second best eye candy next to a 21yo LA model. BUT dirt cheap software doesn't mean quality software, software developed in a hurry is not quality software and that's what douchebag bosses and consumers demand! They want it cheap, they want it shiny and they wanted it yesterday!
Just look at where the actual effort is going, devs focus on delivering half baked solutions on time just to "harden" the software later and I don't blame them, complete, quality, efficient solutions take time and effort and that costs money, money companies and users don't want to invest most of the time. Who gets to worry about efficiency and ms speed gains? Big ass companies where every second counts because it directly affects their bottom line.
People don't give a shit and it sucks but they forfeit the right to complain the moment they start screaming about the buttons not glaring when hovered upon rather than the 60sec bootup, actual efforts to make quality software are made on people's own time or time critical projects.
You put up a nice example with the python tweet snippet, you have a python script that runs everyday and takes 1.6 seconds, what if I told you I'll pay you 50 cents for you to translate it to Rust and it takes you 6 hours or better what if you do it for free?
The answer to that sort of questions is given every day when "enganeers" across the lake claim to make you an Uber app for 100 bucks in 5 days, people just don't care, we do and that's why developers often end up with the fancy stuff and creating startups from the ground up, they put in the effort and they are compensated for it.
I agree things will get better, things are getting better and we are working to make programs and systems more efficient (specially in the Open Source community or high end Tech companies) but unless consumers and university teachers change their mindset not much can be done about the regular folk.
For now my mother doesn't care if her Android phone takes too much time to turn on as long as it runs Candy Crush just fine. On my part I'll keep programming the best I can, optimizing the best I can for my own projects and others because that's just how I roll, but if I'm hungry I won't hesitate to give you the performance you pay for.
Source:
http://tonsky.me/blog/...13 -
Anyone ever run across some code that was so succinct and elegant, that you couldn't imagine ever doing something like that and start to feel bad?
<Look up who committed it>
Oh, well, damn... I used to be so good at this coding thing. -
When I realized my job isn't to code, it is to hack for hacks.
As smart developers our job is to be accountable to non-technical product management types who care nothing for elegant system design or DRY code. They expect features get done fast and "technically complete." They use terms like "minimum viable product (MVP)" to imply we'll go back and improve things like refactoring and tech debt later.
They will not. Most likely they won't even be around. Producers and scrumlords have the highest turnover rate of any role on a team. By design they get bored or frustrated easily and are constantly looking for greener pastures. Many people in self-proclaimed "non-technical" roles like this never had the patience and attention span to learn a real vocation, and they've discovered a career path that doesn't require one.
These are our masters. As developers, we will answer to them forever and always.1 -
Those little moments when you finish writing and refactoring the code and the result is elegant and just works
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Absolutely the best quote from Tao Of Programming...
A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?"
The Master replied: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao."1 -
Write a piece of code that works just fine and it's fairly extensible in 20 minutes.
Then proceed to spend the rest of your night rethinking and replacing said piece of code numerous times, with slightly more elegant code.
7 hours later and I'm still not done. Although a fine way to improve your skills, I seriously need to stop doing that for every single thing I write and start managing my time better. Got lots of other stuff I need to be working on...
Surely I can't be the only one doing this4 -
Sometimes at the end of the day if a solution to a problem seems inefficient I just leave the task rather than writing buggy code. It gives me a day's time, away from the screen, to come up with much better and elegant solution which I eventually code up the next day.
After years of experience I have realised that its better to wait for a day and not write inefficient code rather than trying to fix a hell lot of bugs later.4 -
I appreciate “elegant” code the same way I appreciate fine wine: pretending to care while quietly sitting, passively listening to snobs drone on about barrel aging and vineyards and languages, statically-typed while simultaneously shutting my brain off, ordering another shot of tequila and working up the courage to fight my dad.
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I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.
First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.
That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.
This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.
We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.
TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.9 -
When you're really fuckin proud of that extremely clean, elegant, efficient 30 lines of code. It might not be important, but holy shit it's pretty!!3
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This might not resonate with many ranters here... but FUCK Taylor Otwell & Graham Campbell.
Like, not on a personal level. Maybe they're great to drink a beer with. But as framework devs... fuck everything about them.
Laravel seems so nice, it takes away many annoyances of developing in PHP. Collections are the array object you've always needed. The route bindings, middlewares, request validation objects, it's all sweet.
But eventually your company serves a few million customers, you run into specific performance problems or missing features on a deeper level. You open the issue tracker... and see a few hundred issues about the problems you are encountering, they already exist.
Some just have a short paragraph with a request for a feature, some complete PRs with tests in the style of the framework. All of them closed.
Reasons?
"We don't think anyone will ever need this"
"This seems complicated, you can just do <super non-DRY hacky code>"
FUCK YOU WITH YOUR TODO APP SNIPPETS AND USER-POST-ARTICLE EXAMPLES. I'M NOT BUILDING THE NEXT WORDPRESS. I'M DEALING WITH THE REALITY OF GRAPH DATABASE CLUSTERS, COMPLEX AUDITING LOGS AND A GAZILLION QUERIES PER SECOND.
Sigh... the problem with all these "simple" and "elegant" languages & frameworks is that they don't fucking scale.
Not because the language, server or framework intrinsically can't do it, but because the maintainers are stuck thinking in terms of their retarded non-realistic example apps.
I think I'll go back to my cave and write some Haskell or Rust to calm down.2 -
It is easy to believe something is over-engineered as a junior. You open a solution and get slapped in the face with a wet fish of many classes, with strange names, doing very little, with everything coming together in ways you don't understand.
My advice is to learn about design patterns, clean code, clean architecture, and model driven design. Until that point I don't think you can make such a distinction. And indeed once knowledgeable of patterns and techniques as well as the domain, the same solution can look obvious, elegant and readable.
In a field where everyone is saying 'dont over-engineer', one must be able to tell if something is actually bad, or just uses techniques you don't recognise.
Telling your senior you think something is over done just because you don't understand it is not good. First learn techniques, understand the code, then form opinions that are at least relevant then.
From someone who committed that crime.4 -
GOD ALMIGHTY I HATE SWIFT & XCODE...
Why the fuck does it take a horrendous amount of time to muck about with layout constraints. Why the heck does xcode choose to add constraint layouts to elements that already have pissing constraints! Why does dealing with something as trivial as tables have to be so god damn fucking involved when HTML and CSS let me create and style tables in fuck all lines.
And what the hell is up with how pissing long xcode takes just to figure out that 1 extra line of code I've just added. You jump to another file and xcode finally decides to be an ide again and bitch at the fact that you've forgotten to add some parameter or that they've decided to rename paramter "x" since version fuck nows what.
Working with abstract classes is fun, lets use protocols (because interfaces are too old school) and then lets tack on something we call extensions and then lets make people piss about with convenience initializers.
And lord almighty, what the fuck is up with casting, what all this ?! BS. What's wrong with just checking if the value is null in the first place, or whats wrong with giving something an initial value, oh because having to unwrap shit is more elegant right??
And good god, I need to own a fucking cinema screen just to have the storyboard open, there's less fucking panels on the Sistine Chapel ceiling
then there is in xcode.1 -
I used to think I was the kind of programmer that was good with people. That somehow I was special because I could get on with colleagues and make clients happy.
But fuck people. It’s so easy to be nice, just don’t be not nice. Don’t say rude things and be surprised when I’ve had enough.
For some reason my latest colleagues think it’s too confrontational to talk to each other and instead give management anonymous feedback on who they don’t get on with. Which obviously gets fed back to everyone immediately.
I’m done putting on a smile. Elegant code speaks for itself. I’m getting a PA to talk to people from now on because fuck this.5 -
Look, I get it. Wordpress sucks. It’s bloated. It’s slow. It’s not elegant. It’s a nightmare to debug and code for. The plugin ecosystem is an insecure, confusing mess of outdatedness and issues.
We can all agree that in a perfect world all power to determine everything about a website, from the code to the content, would be in our power as developers. But we don’t live in a perfect world. People want convenience, even at the cost of performance and security, and they will inevitably resent technologists who refuse to give it to them. We do ourselves and our customers a disservice when we only do what we feel is in our own best interests or preferences and not what will help them with their realities.
Yes, it sucks. Yes, it’s a pain. Yes, it’s in demand and there’s nothing any of us can do to change that.
And that’s all I have to say about that.5 -
why do people hate java? it is the most elegant and simple language one can learn and code powerful apps and software. i don't get it11
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I hate React. I keep reading that people have problem of grasping it, but that's not the case for me. I get it, I understand it, but I hate with passion HOW it's done knowing how nice it's done elsewhere. What really triggers me is how ugly it looks, both from architecture and code level. To me it really say a lot when even code shown in documentation looks ugly, and while reading it you ask ourself constantly "why it's done this way?". When I read React being called an "elegant" solution something explodes in me. Did you saw Svelte? Vue? Damn, even Alpine.js?
I just cannot how overengineered this API is. Even doing simplest things there produces so much junk code written only because this is what library requires. Why? I feel like working with it is a punishment.
And scalability and maintainability? I've never seen large-scale projects more messed up than those wrote with React. And yes, you can blame teams working on them for lack of skills, but it is the library which encourages or not good practices also, and I've never seen such bad situation with other libraries/frameworks.8 -
Well this is the thing. I have been starting to replace a lot of my shit with Golang. I think it is a great language because of one small fact: it is a boring language.
With this I don't mean that it is not incredibly fun to use. It is and honestly I feel that a lot of the concepts that I had from C passed quite nicely with some additions. The language does not do anything special and there is no elegant code. It works in a very procedural fashion without taking into consideration any of the snazzy things found in JS, Python, c# etc etc. Interfaces and struct make sense to me, way more than oop does in other languages. I don't need generics with the use of interface parameters and I have hadly found a situation in which I have to strive too far away from the way things are done with Go to be happy with it, then again my projects are not hard or by any means groundbreaking (most of them deal with logistics or content management and a couple of financial apps that I am rewriting in Go from work)
The outcome is fast and easy to read since idiomatic go is for the most part very readable(no people...single letter variable names are by no means a standard and they should feel ashamed from it)
I miss the idea of a framework, but not so much and the docs and internal code for Go is just way top inviting. I believe the code to be readable enough than anyone that has gotten used to the syntax and ideas of the language can just jump in and start learning. This is the first language that I have learnt from studying the code as it is inside of the standard lib, the same I cannot say for any other language or framework.
Also, it play beautifully nice with vs code.
I dunno man, I feel that I am doing something wrong. I have projects built in Node, php, python, ruby and spring java as well as .net core and I still find Golang way more appealing simply because it goes harder than Python with "one preferred way" to do things.
The lang does not make me feel like a pro, i certainly develop in it at pro speeds, but it was made with beginners in mind to built fast and concurrent apps, with the most minimal syntax possible.
I guess my gripe with it is that it gets shunned from this, saying that it ignored years of lang research to make it as dumbed down as possible. Which it did, lack of generics amongst other things certainly make it seem like, but I will not say that it was poorly designed. Not at all, I believe it is a testament of amazing engineering. To be able to create such a simple yet amazingly powerful language.
Wish there were more to it. Wish there was a nice gui lib or a ml framework comparable to the ones offered by python and java. But I guess such things will come with time.
I feel stupid with this language.
And that is fine.5 -
I spend all morning on trying to solve an Algo problem for upcoming interview practice (Euler #3) that comes down to implementing IsPrime.
I remember reading once how Sieve of Eratosthenes
Isa the right way to go do when I first started I wanted to use that.
Then I couldn't think of the right code though so I went with Brute Force (for all numbers upto X see X is divisible by it)
It actually worked but I wanted to just try the "right way".
It's way slower and actually ended up with the wrong answer...
But at this point I don't give a **** anymore.
I guess lesson learned... Use Brute Force first... Then optimise for a problem more elegant solution.10 -
Today I wrote the most epic code.
The kind that breaks your brain, but when you're done with it you know it's time to go home and kick back coz you've done good.
It used recursion, did backflips to avoid unnecessary db calls, featured no code repitition. Hell I even commented the business rules it was following in there to explain what was happening.
I hope it works tomorrow when I test it 😂😂😂5 -
Worst experience of my teachers?
I had handed in an exercise, which the teacher ostensibly thought was so elegant that he wanted to show it in class. I felt complimented and recognized. But then he proceeded to show the code on the screen, and I objected: "this is not my code, don't give me credit for this piece of shit". It had written-by-said-teacher all over it, because his coding style includes mysterious omnipresent acronyms that you could never guess the meaning of. My peers didn't believe me and thought I had written said not-so-elegant code, and the fuss about it degraded my reputation.
To this day I'm wondering as to why he humiliated me like that. He probably had best intent, but I don't get it -
Does anyone here reject a requirement because there exists no elegant solution to it and you shall die before writing spaghetti code?🤔6
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You know that stage you reach when you no longer feel like you can't format text without Googling how to do it, and you confidently build well-designed apps with elegant code?
That stage does arrive, eventually? Right?5 -
You ever sit down to code, all pumped up and ready to conquer the digital world, only to have your computer decide it's the perfect time to install updates? "Sorry, can't work right now, I'm busy optimizing your experience," it says, while you sit there twiddling your thumbs and wondering who asked for this update in the first place.
And let's talk about variable names. Who thought naming things would be the hardest part of programming? You start with `count` and `index`, but by the end of the project, you're using variables like `reallyLongVariableNameThatDescribesExactlyWhatThisThingDoes`. It's like playing a game of how many characters can you type before your fingers revolt.
Then there's the joy of debugging. You sprinkle `console.log()` like breadcrumbs through your code, trying to find where things went off the rails. Half the time, you realize you've been chasing the wrong rabbit down the wrong hole, and the other half, you discover the bug is some obscure edge case that you couldn't have predicted in a million years.
But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. There's a weird satisfaction in solving those coding puzzles, like when you finally get that algorithm to work or refactor your code into something so elegant, it feels like you've sculpted a masterpiece out of digital clay.
So here's to all the coders out there, navigating the ups and downs of curly braces and semicolons with a mix of determination and exasperation. May your code compile, your bugs be minor inconveniences, and your computer never decide to update right when you're on a coding roll!!3 -
I was tinkering around with my linux installation and trying to decide on a new terminal to use, and I ended up compiling st (suckless terminal). On a whim, I decided to look through the source code and see how much of it I would understand.
There was a C header file called arg.h that uses the preprocessor and macros to parse argument flags and songs by setting up a switch statement in a loop, all in under 50 LoC. To use it, just wrap the switch body between ARGBEGIN and ARGEND, and that's it. The comment at the top simply read "copy me if you can", a challenge to future programmers such as myself.
It was the most beautiful, elegant solution I have ever seen. I tried to tell my girlfriend about it, but she just didn't get it. Maybe some of you will appreciate it more:
https://github.com/chjj/st/... -
I always thought wordpress was ok, not great not terrible, from a coding perspective. Now every new framework I have worked on makes me see why Wordpress is on 40% of the internet.
Now I love wordpress not because of what it did do, but because of all the really stupid things it managed to avoid doing including: over abstraction, trend chasing, using "new transformative technology" that disappears in 2 years, breaking plugin economy with updates and making devs start over, making everything OOP for the sake of making everything OOP, making adding on a bit of code take multiple files of multiple formats and boiler plate code, boiler plate code, compiling dependencies, composer, twig, laravel, one page applications, react, angular, vue, javascript only stacks (MEAN), not letting you control sql queries, protected/private scopes and design that doesn't let you fix or alter bad code others did, and the list goes on and on.
Wordpress did a lot right, and devs should try learning from it instead of making more problems to solve. Sure it's not elegant, but you known what it does do? Focus on a solving a problem. Then it does. Without inventing new ideas or concepts to inject into the code and create new problems.
And you know what else? Hooks are actually very well implemented in Wordpress. I've seen it done much worse.
Honestly my main gripe with the entire platform is a slow moving to OOP for no reason and the database design should separate post type into different tables, the current design makes it less scalable for large data sets for multiple reasons so I'd fix that.5 -
For learning purposes, I made a minimal TensorFlow.js re-implementation of Karpathy’s minGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). One nice side effect of having the 300-lines-of-code model in a .ts file is that you can train it on a GPU in the browser.
https://github.com/trekhleb/...
The Python and Pytorch version still seems much more elegant and easy to read though...6 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
Working on complex invoicing systems. For once, the code is clear, elegant, readable and unit-tested... but I keep forgetting how reality works. If only tax laws were self-documenting.
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Grails 2.x all groovy syntax for code and configuration. Simple and elegant.
Grails 3.x all groovy syntax except for the main configuration file. Let's make that a YAML file. F#%king genius!1 -
Today is one of those magnificent days for my code. One of those days where I stumble up on the weirdest bugs and pull a fix out of my hat barely looking at any doc. One of those days where I find out there is a very tricky flaw in our project design and yet I end up finding an elegant solution to circumvent future problems. One of those days where I find the informations I want even though the documentation is the worst I've ever seen.
I love that productive feeling.random efficient docs efficiency i actually don't like tags bugfix bug fix doc bug documentation productive -
Anyone here currently employed as a perl developer? I wanted to know how your experience with the language and the environment has been? I have been going on and off in the perl world for a while know. Currently some interesting perl jobs have been comming up. I have always liked the language but I know that there is a major difference between liking a language for basic scripts and using it in a work environment.
Currently, I have experimented with a few web projects using Perl and I am really digging what I see, the code can be as hacky as you want it to be or as elegant and readable as you make it, such freedom and flexibility is great. -
The one in which I am rn is the reason why so many people dislike php, jquery and Java on the server.
Then previous to this one, classic ASP for the web interface and our desktop components were delphi (OLD ass delphi)
Mind you, these are all tech stacks that I do like (php, java and O Pascal in particular) but really dislike in:
php: we have just your standard procedural spaghetti php on some old ass shit.
Classic ASP: Same as with php, no proper structure, made more apparent by the intense limitations of VBScript, I did enjoy the language tho, had it evolved better It would have been more tolerable, but the hoops i had to take to build a propee API in it....boooooy that shit was an eye opener.
Delphi: Not bad in itself, but the original dev had a shit notion about how architecture should work.....or what architecture is for that matter.
The Java one: this shit was coded when Spring was already an alternative to just fucking around with JSP, or any other framework for that fucking matter. Dude tried....TRIED to implement design patterns in it and it failed on every single fucking component. Worst of all, it was coded in such a shit way that during certain...err...conditions, the bottleneck proved too massive of an ubdertaking and the app chokes and needs to be restarted ... constantly
their use cases for jquery are not bad, but loading all of jquery for the shit they mostly do could have been easily done with just standard vanilla JS.
I got more, but thede are just from the top of my head
I love php, mind you, but shit like this makes me see why some people GREATLY dislikes it.
I alsp have some old web forms in c# and vb net that I loathe, funny enough the code for thise in vb.net is more elegant, almost as if it were from a different developer.3 -
Sometimes I just code some ugly crap that does the job and create a To Do to revisit it later and try to make it elegant.
When I revisit the code I always can't believe that I thought it was bad.
Seems like my past Me is a better programmer than present Me. Ouch. -
I love coding, but there are some days when it drives me absolutely crazy. Like when I spend hours trying to debug a single line of code, only to realize that the problem was actually something completely different.
Or when I'm working on a project and I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing, only to discover that there's a better, faster, and more elegant way to do it. It's like my entire codebase is taunting me: "You thought you were good at this, didn't you?"
But you know what? Despite all of the frustrations and setbacks, I keep coming back to coding. Because there's nothing quite like the feeling of finally getting that piece of code to work, or seeing your project come together in a way that you never thought possible.
Coding can be a rollercoaster of emotions, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Here's to all the developers out there who know what it's like to ride that coding rollercoaster, and who keep coming back for more.1 -
(after morning coffee) Today I’ll change the world and write the most elegant and revolutionary piece of code ever.
(end of day, after 8 zoom meetings and 5 gdocs comment rounds) guess i’ll do these 2 PR reviews tomorrow.1 -
Modern Web Developer
(To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance")
I am the very model of a modern web developer
I’m quite fluent with JavaScript; An HTML whisperer
My code is clean and elegant, I genuinely innovate
And even know my way around a Promise and async / await
I’m very well acquainted too with matters vector graphical
I understand why SVG coordinates seem magical
And even without Photoshop I elegantly can produce
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
[Chorus]
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
I'm quite adept at ES6 expressions like destructuring
I know the ins and outs of functional reactive programming
In short, in matters browser-based or Node.js if you prefer
I am the very model of a modern web developer
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer
I know our mythic history, the humble start, the browser wars
I know why Douglas Crockford fought the battle over ES4
The World Wide Web Consortium and Ecma International
My knowledge of our legacy is truly supernatural
With LESS and SASS and CSS, designing for mobility
I’ll perfectly apply the right amount of specificity
From custom fonts and parallax to grid and flex and border-box
I know most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
[Chorus]
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
And when it comes to lazy loading, bundling up and splitting code
There’s nothing quite like Webpack, which of course is built on top of Node
Considering my resume, I’m certain that you will concur
I am the very model of a modern web developer
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer
When new frameworks and libraries emerge I must be ravenous
And gobble up the hot new thing, my appetite is bottomless
React and Vue and Angular, Immutable, RxJS
The list will be outdated long before I'm finished singing this
My pull requests rely on multitudinous utilities
To help me lint and test and build, a deluge of analyses
And every single day there are a hundred thousand more to learn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
[Chorus]
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
This pace is agonizing! Code from yesterday is obsolete!
The speed of innovation is enough to knock me off my feet!
It's happening too fast! I can’t keep up! I’m tired! It’s all a blur!
I am the very model of a modern web developer!
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer!1 -
I am busting moves rn. I'm in the bathroom but the surge of energy is making me pump my arms like the time Leo Messi scored a clutch winner against Valencia in 2019
Remember the plugin I referred to in this rant? https://devrant.com/rants/6019851/...
Yup! I managed to subdue that fossilised codebase. Effected all changes required. To have a rough idea about how ancient the code is, its classes use constructors predating PHP 5. It throws away the ~15 years of autoloading, view templates, routing engines, DI, ORMs (NO PDO!!), lower-cased multi word variable names, etc. I'm looking at SCRIPTS with raw functions north of 4-600 lines. The client insisted I zip the folder across
BUT! The good news is, we surmounted it. In fairness to them, it's commendable for one man to have pulled this off. The codebase is massive and appears to have been predominantly written by some Gideon dude. Who knows where he is now
There is one pattern I appreciate –something I wish Transphporm does–some segments of the rendered view are composed using class methods ie instead of having the HTML file mixed with templating syntax, you have class methods that receive the raw data. Then you can extend this class as you wish, overriding just the method that composes the segment you intend to modify. That was elegant to work with. But it can become dreadful if the class expects a specific structure of data (an array with weird keys) that you have no access to sourcing
So, I finally get to enjoy one good evening in 2/3 weeks. I called 2 friends to express an emotion that's not gloomy, but they were unavailable. Will probably get some sleep4 -
Damn, I hate Spring and most CoC frameworks. We’re using it from 2 years, I read most of the docs and it still gives issue for basic taks which takes hours to fix because I have to guess the exact convention which allows the program to process corner cases which aren’t explained in the docs. Yes, in the end the code is more elegant but it’s worth it when issues which could be solved in minutes by a trivial if/else statement takes hours (rigorously on pair programming™️ since being one of the few which actually read the docs I end up with lots of calls for help for Spring related issues by other teammates) and huge headaches to fix following the framework’s way?2