"When you have a problem you can't solve, just google it. If you don't find another person that has encountered the same problem/error as you, you're doing something wrong."

- Software Engineering teacher, 2016

Hahaha....... UGHH

Software requirements

This is a fun conversation I had:

Test Engineer: 😑 The test bench burst into flames.
Me: 😪😲 Do what now?
TE: 😐 The test bench burst into flames. It made a pretty impressive fire ball.
Me: 😮 . . . How are you so calm about this?
TE: 😐 Well it's not on fire now.
Me: 😶 Good point.
TE:😧 made me mad as hell though.
Me: 😕 why's that?
TE: 😬 Cuz I only had one damn step left in that test procedure and it was to turn the damn test bench off.
Me: 🤔 Correct me if I'm wrong but the test bench is off is it not?
TE: 😐 Well yeah.
Me: 🤔 and you caused it to be turned off by your actions no?
TE: 😕 . . . yeah . . .
Me:🤔 sounds like you turned it off to me.
TE: 😒
Me: 🙂
TE: 😐
Me: ☺
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😐 but it won't turn on again.
Me: 🤔 do you have a requirement to be able to turn it on again after you turn it off?
TE: 😑 It's implied.
Me: 😐 not what I asked
TE: 😧 No not explicitly.
Me: 😎 sounds like you completed the test procedure.
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😑
Me: 😎
TE: 😧 that's not how it works.
Me: 😎 doesn't it?
TE: 😑 No.
Me:😎
TE: *walks away* 😧😧😧
Me: *turns back to computer* well I was just trying to help YOU out 😒

I am the best at interpersonal communication.

Double achievements rant!
Computer engineering graduation (finally) + face reveal.

Someone: What do you do for a living?
Me: I tell computers how to be computers in their language.

Couldn't say it better myself.

Running from my job to my bus stop while having my phone in my hands trying to fend off a cyber attack while my hands are nearly freezing and its raining like hell.

Sometimes my job is just fucking awesome.

Can I get a ++ from all the lady developers on this app or from anyone who supports women in STEM? Signed, a fellow female engineer

Whoever at Dell thought it would be a good idea to put the charging port next to the USB port is a genius

Fact:

As sad as true :[

I am graduating tomorrow :)

So the bosses and general peeps at work never close our door properly.

Finally earning the "engineer" part of our job titles :p!

Science vs Engineering

!dev
Just found out my house's heating system relies on this. A button, being held down by a bolt held by a zip tie. Who in their right mind looked at this, was like "this is fine" and left it there.
My dad, apparently.

Software Engineering Matrix

A marvel of engineering

I work in a company where I'm the only developer, with everyone being designers or marketing or sales. Typically like the scene from Silicon Valley.

Moto was to create a ticket selling website for their products, and make sure they worked as well. It was all fine, until deadlines were discussed. They wanted it done within 2 weeks, the entire backend dashboard, API and front end.

I told them it's almost impossible to do it, but they insisted on it. So, I made a minimal dashboard and told them, I haven't completed a few things, such as if you edit data in one place, it won't reflect in other tables. So, be careful while editing the data.

They nodded their head for everything, yesterday was site launch and 2 hours before that one bastard decided to changed the product names to something "catchy" but failed to change the same in other places.

I had used the name as foreign key, so querying other DBs became a fuck all issue, and eventually API stopped giving any response to front end calls.

I got extremely pissed, and shouted at that dude, for fucking everything up. He said, you're the tech guy and you should've taken all this into account.

I sat and hardcoded all the data into database again, made sure site is live. Once it was live, these guys call a company meeting and fire me saying I was incompetent in handling the stressful situation.

At that moment, I lost my shit and blasted each of those people. The designer started crying since her absurd designs(though great) couldn't be realised in CSS that too within 2 weeks time.

One of the worst experience for working for a company. I could've taken the website down, and told them to buzz off if they'd called, I couldn't get myself to do it, hence ranting here.

I seriously feel, all these tech noob HRs need to get a primer course on how to deal with problems of a programmer before they get to hire one, most of these guys don't know what we're trying to tell in itself.

I find devRant to be the only place where I can get someone to understand the issues that I face, hence ranted.

TL;DR: Coded ticket selling site in 2 weeks. 3 hours to launch, data entry dude fucks up. I clean all the mess, get the site online. Get fired as soon as that happens.

Live long and prosper. Peace.

Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.

Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".

Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?

Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?

Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.

Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?

I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.

But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.

Random friend: "hey! What course are you studying?"

Me: "computer science engineering"

RF: "oh cool, can you install Ubuntu in my laptop?"

Me: *shoots her*

Happiness is simple

Unit testing?

So my friend just got this. Notice the URL it's kinda sad. It seems like they've just given up 😂

Ooh how times have changed...lol

Nothing beats the " whiteboard "

!!!rant

I GOT THE JOB!

It's amazing to see how far we've come!!!🤓🤓🤓

Ready for the Holidays?

That's another semester completed!

Software engineering class has been nothing but UML creation. I understand that their important but I just want to actually, ya know, engineer some software.

>Degree i think im getting: software engineering
>Degree my parents think im getting: repair magic

Sarcasm is so underrated!!

Found this today

Parents bought a new fridge then asked me to "set it up" because you're good with computers.

Software engineering and developers and life cycle of Project 🤣🤣🤣😂😂

I graduated today!

Fighting an IT guy is lot like fighting a pig in mud. After some time you realise pig likes the mud.

I did engineering for this

I posted a picture previously about my gear stacking adventures. Here is yet another. Took me a little more time.

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

I will take this as a compliment :)

This is the real software engineering evaluation

No such thing as unscrewable screw.
Engineering prevails!

This is crazy 😜

Really found this type of students when I was finding someone to collab with me for final year project

Him: I am a software engineer.
Me: That is great, do you use specific technology?
Him: Multiple, but my basic is YouTube.
Me: Sorry, I didn't get it? You mean YouTube API?
Him: No need, I have a channel on YouTube... And podcast a lot about software engineering.
Me: So you don't write code anymore?
Him: I didn't, engineering is more than writing codes.
Me: Yes it is....

True that😁😁😂😂

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

- Brian W. Kernighan (The Elements of Programming Style)

Over-engineering feels like

For the first two year of my engineering I believed having a good developer profile will land you in top companies(eg FAANG).

Later I realised doing competitive coding will help you to get in those companies.

But at the end I saw one of my friend getting into those companies by only doing specific type questions that are usually asked in these companies.

Moral of the story - Just by practicing some specific question from some premium website(eg leetcode), you could easily get into your dream company.

PS- I was not selected in any of these giant companies and later on took an internship in some start up which was again a tragedy for me.

To all those who are on the same boat, Happy Engineer's Day!!!

I often times write code and think to myself "I don't have to comment this, it's obvious what is going on", only to find myself back at the same code, figuring out wtf it does...

A group of Engineering professors were invited to fly in a plane.

Right after they were comfortably seated, they were informed the plane was built by their students.

All but one got off their seats and headed frantically to the exits in maniacal panic.

The one lone professor that stayed put, calmly in his seat, was asked: “Why did you stay put?”

“I have plenty of confidence in my students. Knowing them, I for a fact can assure you this piece of shit plane will never even start”

Source: r/jokes

So... Some fake accounts on Twitter claimed to be Elon Musk and to give shitloads of Bitcoin to those who sent a little amount first. They stole... Wait for it... 180 grand.

That's basically your everyday 419 scam. Existing since before the internet, done with the names of Gates, Buffet, Bush, Obama...

They say "the big bad evil criminals and the poor little innocent victims" I say natural selection. Sorry, in those lion vs gazelle scenarios I always thought that it was fair, no matter how it went.

Just when did humanity get so brainless? Have we always been, is the internet just a catalyst for stupidity?

Just why the fuck must I be an infosec sheepdog instead of a wolf? Man, I could live the life, drink beer and smoke herb while working... Get up at 12, don't give a shit, no boss, no taxes, no social security payments that I don't see jack shit from, and the pay would be better to.

Damn.

RANT TIME!

Sorry guys, I know this is devRant and probably not a place to post this but am fucking burning with fury and fatigue! I should probably develop elecRant and post it there instead.

I FUCKING HATE POWER ELECTRONICS!!

I am in my final year of electrical engineering and I can fucking say with confidence that power electronics is the most fucked up unit I have seen in my life. A whole load of useless math from simple RLC circuits just to make students' lives miserable. For those who might not know, power electronics is some unit that involves use of solid state electronics(transistors, diodes etc) for power applications(switching mostly). Basically things like inverters and converters. UPS systems are an example of their applications.
Now don't be fooled by how that sounds cool and so smart, this shit is fucked up. These circuits in the attached picture might just seem like simple RLC networks with some BJTs, but they are devils in their own right. They fucking need some advanced unnecessary calculus and Fourier analysis to even calculate the simplest output current!! Worst still, some of these motherfuckers have more than 1 mode of operation,needing one to analyze some fucking 100+ waveforms. I fucking hate this shiit! I hate it!
You might say that i am just being lazy and don't want to study. Let me tell you something, FUCK YOU TOO!!

I am a student. A Geospatial Engineering student. I made a demo Cordova app mapping incident spots on OSM., now my fellow undergrads think I can hack NSA, program a satellite, build all their dream websites and apps. The College Department wants me to lead an in-house photogrammetric programmable drone project. If they ask I'll say yes... yes I can! shit.😂

How to make your users love you 101

Which side are you on? Lol

Every indian engineer can relate🤣🤣

So apparently I've reached the shameful age where friends of my aunt think it's legit to try and set me up with guys. Criteria so far: guys from the same institute I graduated.
Are you trying to genetically engineer a race of engineers?!

Couldn't agree more to this.
Found it on LinkedIn

Why do people jump from c to python quickly. And all are about machine learning. Free days back my cousin asked me for books to learn python.
Trust me you have to learn c before python. People struggle going from python to c. But no ml, scripting,

And most importantly software engineering wtf?
Software engineering is how to run projects and it is compulsory to learn python and no mention of got it any other vcs, wtf?

What the hell is that type of college. Trust me I am no way saying python is weak, but for learning purpose the depth of language and concepts like pass by reference, memory leaks, pointers.

And learning algorithms, data structures, is more important than machine learning, trust me if you cannot model the data, get proper training data, testing data then you will get screewed up outputs. And then again every one who hype these kinds of stuff also think that ml with 100% accuracy is greater than 90% and overfit the data, test the model on training data. And mostly the will learn in college will be by hearting few formulas, that's it.

Learn a language (concepts in language) like then you will most languages are easy.

Cool cs programmer are born today😖

That feeling when the networking teacher puts all her powerpoints in comic sans

Ok, I give up reverse engineering this. Full of netscape compatibility and iframes, and more shit.
Typical korean websites. ^v^

Man, fuck the SO community
I asked a question on software engineering (all fancy like, links quotes checked spelling and grammar etc.)
if it would be beneficial to switch to another language in order to increase performance and memory limitations during a specific task

Literally one guy said it violated 4 of their rules
Opinion based; asking for language switch; too vague and another one

About 20/30 minutes later my question had a -3 score...

Fuck off with too vague, also why shouldn't I switch language for a single task... If it would be faster..

Anyway found an even better solution, but it cannot be enough said.. the SO community is a bunch of old stubborn fucks who only care about their score.

Had last paper today... Finally 4 yrs of engineering comes to an end. I am a proud computer engineer....

Reality 😂😂

The Periodic Table Of Software Engineering

Now this is truly April Fool..

Was going through some old books and found the mathematical proof that building good software from the beginning has positive long term effects... in case anyone had any doubts

Coders get yourself a electronics friend and electronic heads get yourself a coder.

I got a friend who studies engineering and really loves it and i do software development with a passion.
And we both love to chill with some drinks every now and then.

The result: We're currently creating a thing which fills you drinks via a button press on your phone.😁
Optional paypal payment for every drink for use at parties of course.(;

I often want to scream at co-workers because of their lack of attention to details.

I believe attention to detail is important for software engineers.

I tell my junior developers that "it works" isn't enough, you need to make sure it works as perfectly as possible and paying attention to detail helps with that.

Source: improgrammer.net

I recently got a Sysadmin/Devops job at an Uber-like local startup.
After a few days in and with a 20% increase in daily API calls, we started getting "502 gateway error" for like half of the requests which was insane!
I double checked nginx, php-fpm, mysql, etc and in the end turns out that they log every app login session in a 680K row table in a mysql database and run a query every time to find out if the client was logged in or not!

°__°

I'm currently one of two "pen testers" for the anticheat system of a game.

It all started a few days ago when the developer handed me the obfuscated package and told me to go at it. No big deal, I've bypassed it before the obfuscation, so I just changed some imports and sent in the screenshot.

Fast forward 100+ hours, it's turned into a cat-and-mouse game. He sends us (the testers) an update, we break it within hours. We show him what we exploited and he attempts to fix it. Rinse and repeat.

Finally, today he patched the one hole that I've been using all this time: a field in a predictable location that contains the object used for networking. Did that stop me? No!

After hours of searching, I found the field in an inner class of an inner class. Here we go again.

How do you keep up with new information coming out every day? Like every time I browse Hacker News, Reddit or Twitter after 2 days I feel like living in another planet... It gets overwhelming at times.

- be me
- get home hook laptop up to tv, realise you left your wireless mouse at work *fuck*
- remember you still have a wireless keyboard and are pretty handy with shortcuts *duh*
- use keyboard magic, launch Netflix and play the show you want to watch *yay 🎉*
- realise the fucking cursor is over the play bar so you have to get up anyway. *fuck*

These days keyboard shortcuts can only take you so far.

Words of wisdom

My wife. At software engineering 1st year

Do compiler engineers compile compilers? 🤔

Your code is supposed to solve the primary problem you have. It is not supposed to create problems and solve those problems you do not have initially.

1 - Writing a 20 lines Python module in 15 minutes approx.
2 - Accidentally deleting this module.
3 - Taking 1 hour finding a way to generating source code from the compiled PYC Python file.

I'm a bit weary of devRant being almost software-exclusive. I want to see more about hardware development here (and not just people playing with Arduinos)!

Electronics guys of devRant: Do you exist? What are you working on? Or is really everyone here a web developer?

(GIF related: My soldering irons heating up, the third one being my weekend project from last weekend. Seeing it coming in last, I'll probably have to tune its control parameters a bit more…)

So here is a story of me making a website for my home server. I created a static site which did a okay job but I wanted to get available ram and CPU usage displayed on it, and I didn't want to use a php/backend. Here how I achieved it: I used a bat file on a scheduler which exports the usage via CMD commands into raw files. From these raw files I used HTML IFrames to display the text. Thus achieves my goal with minimal effort.

Final year of engineering and feel I have so much more to learn reading all these posts on devDrant :/

When you try to reverse engineer some $5 toy but the ICs Datasheet is only in chinese ;-(
And Google translate for pdf sucks.

!rant

Is a bachelor's degree worth it?

Context:
Up until yesterday, I was planning on not getting a Bacherlor's degree related to programming. I'm currently an intern and I believe that they'll want to keep me afterwards. Even it they don't, my old boss has a junior developer position opening soon and he asked me if I was interested.

I think I'm a good programmer, but I'm not here to boast, but rather, I want to know your opinion:
Is getting a bachelor's degree in software engineering worth it?

I know this topic is not new and has been asked in many forums, but I noticed a repetitive trend: people who have the degree say it's worth it and people who don't say it's not.

TL;DR:
Is getting a bachelor's degree in software engineering worth it? Why?

I had to set up a Raspberry Pi just to display a webpage since it is inexpensive and I didn't have enough budget to get a case for it so I present my homemade case. Lol. It's zip tied to the box within another box.

not exactly a rant but thought I should share this 😂

So before the Age of JavaScript, when programming was trying to be an engineering discipline, I felt like we were getting close to figuring out what worked and what didn't. We had rules of thumb (more general than Patterns) and code smells.
Then JavaScript came in and no one had time to think about "engineering" anymore. I'm fine with MVP and small iterations, but the disdain I see for making code clean and extendable and improvable is baffling (and annoying). First-time coders might never have had to fix someone else's code, but two weeks in a chair should have fixed that.
It's not that understanding code is so hard (although it can be); understanding the _intent_ is hard. This MVP is great, but when no one had time to document what is actually supposed to happen, programmers have to reverse-engineer the *design*.

software engineers pals I need your help OoO/

do you know some articles about how to write code documentation?

When your colleague comments out some of your codes just to reverse engineer how it works. And checked it in!!!

Computer engineering : Insanity!!!

Today a friend of mine was assigned to make a Client-Server Encryption using Sockets. The guy did a great job applying BlowFish algorithm, but the teacher was disappointed because she couldnt map letters to the encrypted text and she declared the program to be wrong!!!

Just "learned" that Singleton is a good design pattern with no disadvantages. And in MVC the model should be a singleton.

FML :^)

I'm in the 3rd year of engineering and did not learn anything from college. Thought it was high time. In the past 6 months I learned html, css and python. Not fully, but I practice everyday and now fallen in love with coding. Started making a 2d game on python as well. Will put it on Github when there will be something to show. Thank you devs all around the world for helping and answering all my stupid doubts. I love this community :D

Solved😂

To the wizards of reverse engineering here: how did you start learning how to do this magic?

Story of a ML Engineer. 😂😂😂

How I felt after spending an entire afternoon planning and designing a new feature for a project only to realize half of my design was wrong after I started implementing it

Subaru's Symmetrical AWD is the best thing in the world at the moment. Also, warning: !dev

Tl;dr: I'm getting another RPi3 thanks to awesome engineering.

Got a couple of inches of light snow here, and on my way home I came across a GMC Sierra dually stuck at the bottom of a moderately sized ditch. Naturally, I stopped by in my Forester and offered to tow it out.

With my 20ft tow rope stretched to its full length I was barely touching the road. He signalled that he was ready, and I gunned it. Slowly but surely the truck crawled out of the 6ft deep trench. She crested the hill with much applause (from me and the driver of the truck). As a thanks, he gave me $30.

Looks like I'm gonna get a new Raspberry Pi to play with. I think I'll turn this one into a countertop MAME arcade machine.

And for those of you wondering why I'm praising Symmetrical AWD as opposed to AWD in general, here's a quick lesson in drivetrains:
Most all wheel drive cars power the front wheels most of the time. This saves on fuel economy. The thing is, power is only transmitted to the rear wheels when the front wheels start to lose traction. At that point you're already screwed; only two wheels at any one time are putting useful power to the road.
Symmetrical AWD systems, like you'll find in all Subarus and most performance cars, distribute the vehicle's torque eaqually front-rear at all times. So instead of waiting until the front wheels start slipping, all of the wheels are powered right off the bat.

To make this more devvy: grrrr php, vim is best, I configured the tab key to enter four spaces, js has too many damn frameworks and they're still being pumped out faster than rabbits in a bunny farm.

Same with my computer graphics lab !

Engineering students be like

I don’t just want to learn how to scrap together applications.

I want to become an engineer; one that can wear that badge properly.

I spent a day or two reading my peers code base in .NET Core to start learning its wizarding ways. I found myself emulating some of the patterns.

Then I found a tutorial series on putting together a correctly decoupled RESTful API...the same chap wrote an SDK for Azure CosmoDB.

THIS is what I am talking about.

I can’t believe these guys at work have twenty years C# experience between them and they are churning out this shit for more than 1.5x my salary.

I want to become this but I swear half the coding world does NOT care.

Learning IDA rn, any advice?

First course of "Software Engineering", it is full of project management ...
I'm so disappointed ...

52 min Are you fxxxxx kidding me.
Thumbs up Optimization of the decade

Why do people think it is weird to have job (programming) also be your hobby?!?

I get annoyed with this kind of people, if I like what I do, and have spent infinite amount of hours enjoying while learning, I think it is normal to have job as your hobby. Or even better phrasing, it is normal to have hobby as your job!!!

Many people here rant about the dependency hell (rightly so). I'm doing systems programming for quite some time now and it changed my view on what I consider a dependency.
When you build an application you usually have a system you target and some libraries you use that you consider dependencies.
So the system is basically also a dependency (which is abstracted away in the best case by a framework).
What many people forget are standard libraries and runtimes. Things like strlen, memcpy and so on are not available on many smaller systems but you can provide implementations of them easily. Things like malloc are much harder to provide. On some system there is no heap where you could dynamically allocate from so you have to add some static memory to your application and mimic malloc allocating chunks from this static memory. Sometimes you have a heap but you need to acquire the rights to use it first. malloc doesn't provide an interface for this. It just takes it. So you have to acquire the rights and bring them magically to malloc without the actual application code noticing. So even using only the C standard library or the POSIX API can be a hard to satisfy dependency on some systems. Things like the C++ standard library or the Go runtime are often completely unavailable or only rudimentary.
For those of you aiming to write highly portable embedded applications please keep in mind:
- anything except the bare language features is a dependency
- require small and highly abstracted interfaces, e.g. instead of malloc require a pointer and a size to be given to you application instead of your application taking it
- document your ABI well because that's what many people are porting against (and it makes it easier to interface with other languages)

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.

Reverse engineering is REALLY hard when you have to google every instruction/address to comment them. I was trying to reverse engineer my BIOS and this thing is hard.

I'm studying Computer Science and Engineering in Uni.

People don't understand the most fundamental principles of programming at all. Variables and functions are like a foreign language to them.

I get that not everyone knows everything but if you decide to go to uni to study programming, and you have never programmed before. Are you really in the right place?

I've been working remotely for more than 6 months, but today it's the first time I'm coding wearing only underpants

Living the dream

Boss: Hey, we have a meeting in 10 minutes.. Get prepared for it.. (Though they told me about this 100 years ago)
Me: What!! How can I do that?
Boss: You are an engineer.. You must be used to with last minute preparations..
Me: 😕
==========================

Had to adhoc re-record couple sponsored TV-ads' voice overs and didn't have time to get to a studio.. True engineer always finds a way to make most out of the resources at hand.

Excellent sound btw, good mic + non-echoing 'recording chamber'. ;)

"Coding is not design, design is not coding"

Just installed Flutter!

So I have this "Software Engineering" course of this semester.

According to course curriculum we are supposed to taught "how to develop software for some real life problem".

Fast forward to this day. For FUCKING 8 WEEKS WE ARE GONNA JUST DO DOCUMENTATION(SRS, Problem description, features description etc) AND IMPLEMENT WHOLE PROJECT IN JUST ONE WEEK.

BURN IN HELL YOU FUCKING SHIT PROFESSOR....

So I'm wired into an ethernet box downloading an update via command prompt on a fucking ancient corporate laptop I pulled from the legacy gear dumpster that's about 20% original hardware. I get pulled aside by some loser and told that they just called security, who will detain me and confiscate my laptop. He says he's going to call his boss to fill him in. He calls, my phone rings. I laugh in his face, light a cigarette, flash my ID (my drivers license on a company lanyard) in his face and say "that'll be pretty hard since I'm your boss." I think I might have been able to see his soul exit his body. Side note- I was not his boss, I'm an infosec engineer of decidedly middling abilities and just try to practice my social engineering skill regularly...

Daily dose of my Software Engineering class.

If you're a "software engineer" with 10+ years of experience, but you've never written a unit test.... you're just a script kiddie with no right to call yourself a "software engineer".

Sometimes we do over engineering.

I was browsing the jobs secion on SO, and came across a position looking for a 'Python Software Engineer.' WHAAAAA? PYTHON IS A FUCKING SCRIPTING LANGUAGE! SINCE WHEN IS IT SUITABLE FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING?

I have found the best game for learning ever XD
I have recently heared about io.netgarage.org and tried to solve several it's levels, and I find this game awsome
It is the best to learn reverse engineering)) it is just like an Impossible quiz, where you have to smash the stack to get to the next level))
I have wasted much time for that, but it is worth it))
((Not an advertisment))

Why is it so hard to find internships in india? !!
Aaaaaaaarg

If you're not from india, is it hard to find some there too?

Find yourself a manager/leader who knows a bit about software engineering. Better still, find one who is/was a software engineer him/herself.

Because software engineering is a form of art. A leader who doesn't understand your art won't be able to properly appreciate it.

They won't be interested in how and why you make/do something. They're only interested in how fast can you get it done.

~ The Feelings ~

The feeling when someone thinks you can fix his laptop/phone/other electronic device because you know how to program.

The feeling when someone tells you that you can't program because you are bad at math, but you realize majority of the time that breaking down mathematical formulas into code requires no mathematical skills, in fact you learn it better that way.

The feeling when someone calls programming 'legos for autists' and you can't legally lock him up in your basement for few months.

The feeling when one of programming languages finally gets an update with a feature that existed in all other languages you didn't learn for few years now and they call it a big 'breakthrough'.

The feeling when someone learned basic programming and says he'll make a game, with his own engine and starts listing features he can't have any clue about.

..I'm done, for now :)

Starting a new audio book. Figured this would be a fun listen.

truth 😁

Canadian software engineers know the feeling...

Four and half months,
Hundreds of hundreds PRs and one additional product cluster
By 6 Engineers..
To 500+ micro services
Which has no timezone or currency context,
Created by 250+ engineers,

To launch in a new country...

It didn't make me happy.

But the feedback from customers and drivers is priceless and #heartwhelming

This happened in my engineering days.

Second semester of my engineering, intro to computer science.

Topic on computer virus

Professor : "Examples of virus are videogames."

Me : *Screaming internally.

FYI, this "professor" has a PhD in computer science.

Fast forwarding to the final semester. We were supposed to present our project.
Unfortunately this professor was our mentor for the project work.

I was dedicated to this project. I was working on this for 10 hours a day. We were supposed to show the progress of our project to our mentor in four project reviews for the entire semester before presenting it in the final exam.

On the first review of the project, he started asking questions which are completely unrelated to the project, asking us to implement features which will take a lot of time and completely unnecessary. Basically, he didn't understood the project at all. On top of that he was shouting on us instead of pointing out the errors and the areas of improvement on the project.

And then I thought " Why am I busting my ass on this project for this idiot?"

Got demotivated, and started working on my side projects.

For the next reviews, got similar project off the internet, presented the same thing for the reviews and in the final exam. Got an A grade.

Honestly, I don't understand how these people get their PhDs and become professors in colleges and universities.

Quote by Uncle Bob: “Never forget that, as programmers, you are stakeholders too. Your technical and ethical reputation is on the line. You have a say. You also have feet.”

Reverse engineering:

gnireenigne

Finding fragile balance between “we need to create a programming language to solve this task elegantly and efficiently” and “yo dawg here’s some php, go get that shit together”

family/neighbour: you are engineer?
me: Yes, but software engineer
family/neighbour: can u fix my tv or iron

I am a computer science student and have worked with Java and C++ until now. A week ago i started in a job i have gotten from my professor. I have to reverse engineer a big python project and figure out how some things work on the serverside. This is the first time i have to work with python.

I get that you can write code fast with this dynamically typed language, but BOY. Is it just me or is this language fucking hard to reverse engineer? I mean what the fuck. There are some member variables in which can be anything. Like you suggest there is an object of this and that and then python comes in and is like: Good guess, but fuck you.

Just because you have no idea what you are doing does not make you an artist.

So can we please treat software development as engineering?

I get that in software there are a lot of unknowns and you won't always find best practices, especially if you want to be a pioneer on the bleeding edge.

Yet maybe that issue you were trying to solve with your hackish -- I mean artfully -- solution is a lack of understanding of the basic technology?

If you want to do art, try poetry.

Parents to college watchman - "Is this a good college?"
Watchman - "Probably the best. I completed my engineering here and got campus placement."

// Task: add one to the input number

// Sane people:
// print(int(input())+1)

// Me:

n = [*(reversed(bin(int(input()))[2:]))]

tmp = ""
for i in range(len(n)):
tmp = n[i]
tmp = "1" if tmp == "0" else "0"
n[i] = tmp
if tmp == "1":break

if tmp == "0":n+=["1"]
n = "".join(reversed(n))

n = int(n,2)
print(n)

Tldr: I failed a test and was sad about jt

So a while ago I had a python exam for my study, nothing special like a certification or anything, just the basics. We are not allowed to use internet because they want to prevent people from communicating from one another. Usually im fine with this rule, but this time it screwed me over so much.

The exam is setup in 3 main assignments each of which has 5 subassignments. Hence, if you cant do subassignment 1, you fail the entire main assignment and lose 33% of your grade. I completely blacked out during the exam and couldnt remember how to simply get a number from a string interpreted as an int and forgot how to work with json. Because we weren't allowed to use internet I wasn't able to figure this out and have now failed the test.

I'm so sad and mad at myself for not acing such an easy test and for a day I felt unworthy of being a programmer. Thank God I got over that and have a resit somewhere next week.

Business > Engineering

this year, for the first year ever, computer science majors were invited to the engineering banquet

Take over responsibility you fucking morons!

We are the engineering team and we cannot know how you operate our product in every detail. And for god's sake don't blame us when shit happens in production when you don't test upcoming deployments by yourself!

//First rant

So I've been working trying to get a file exporter for a binary file format mostly reverse engineered - 2001 Super Monkey Ball 2 (GameCube) if anyone's interested.

Everything works fine, goals show up in the right places, wormholes work as intended, etc. That is everything, except every single level you create will be invisible, or crash (Depending on which version of Dolphin emu you use).

This happens whenever trying to specify object names for 3D objects. I checked, all the many offsets seem correct, Object names are correct. Tried both null terminated strings and fixed 80 character strings - nothing.

Some other guy also made an exporter that works, however the code is an absolute mess - basically unreadable. It also lacks some newer parts of the file spec, which is the main reason as to why I'm rewriting it.

And as I'm working with an almost entirely unheard of file format, there are few people to go to for help. The 2 I know who are also familiar with the LZ file format have no idea either...

Sigh.

So the project I work on basically has to talk to a 3rd party plugin, through a 3rd party framework. The 3rd party plugin is a black box. This conversation happened:

Software guy: so we aren't sure what is breaking the thing. It's either us or the plugin, but it's probably both.

Systems guy: well then if we aren't sure then why are we writing an issue for it.

SWG: because we aren't sure but we know we are doing at least something that contributes. We read int X from a table and put it into a float. X doesn't perfectly represent in a float. It comes out X.0001. Then they take it and when it comes back it comes back as Y.0001. We cram it into an int so it becomes Y, we compare it to X which is really X.0001 and it comes back invalid.

SG: well as long as we are sending them the right number . . .

SWG: but we aren't sending them the right number. They are expecting X not X.0001. Then they send us back Y.0001 but it should be X so it's wrong.

SG: so they're giving us the wrong return value.

SWG: yes, but because we're giving them the wrong number.

SG: well not exactly . . .

SWG: yes exactly. It is off by .0001 because of floating point math.

SG: well . . .

Me: look it doesn't matter how it's breaking. But it IS broken. Which is why we're filling out the damn problem report. THEY ARE EDITABLE. We talked to the customer and gave them the risk assessment. They don't care. It happens rarely any way.

SG: then can we lower the severity?

Me: no. Severity doesn't relate to risk. That is a whole different process. Severity assumes it has already happened. It's a a high severity.

SG: but the metrics.

Me: WE GIVE THE METRICS TO THE CUSTOMER. WE TALKED TO THE CUSTOMER. THEY DON'T GIVE A SHIT.

And that was how I spent Wednesday wondering how a level 4 lead systems engineer got his job. How many push ups did he do? What kind of juice did he drink?

I'm in this university software engineering course, where the professor decides he need to teach us the entire history of software engineering.

Dude, we were taught how to use SVN in addition to Git. Huh? And for software development processes, we were taught a total of 7 of them. There're: code and fix, waterfall, prototyping, spiral, phased, agile and lean. And the tests are like "list 5 advantages and disadvantages for X, and compare them to the advantages and disadvantages of Y". Wtf dude. I don't mind memorizing things, but the things I learn aren't even relevant (except agile and lean). Nobody would be impressed if I say I know SVN in an interview. What am I doing with my life. Ok, back to cramming this shit cuz i need my GPA. Bye.

Tip !

Never ask a Network Engineer for his/her address?

Its not what you expected

Dear bluetooth headset,
I know your battery is low, thanks for the notice. I have 1 hour work left, after that you will get your charge. I also know you underestimate your own power and can do more than an hour on reserve.

So suck it up and stop being a whiny bitch blaring your damn "battery low"-beeps into my ears. It's way too loud and beeping every 10 seconds will only strain your power reserves and my nerves.

Yours sincerely,
dev13

Software engineering doesn't evolving the way you think of it.

There are no new big patterns. There are no new big concepts and ideas to bring that evolution to us. Rob Pike thinks that the concepts he used twenty years ago are the best possible way of implementing everything and he creates Golang.

The evolution of software engineering, and maybe the whole evolution as a concept is a tick-tock. Software engineering had its latest tick at nineties, when the concepts we call modern were developed. And the latest tock was the rise of the internet, and it given the single-computer-centered Von Neumann architecture really hard challenges. I mean ticks are theoretical inventions and patterns and ideas and etc, while tock is more of some practical, business-oriented implementations.

PHP is still in use. We have troubles with scaling and deployment. Banking systems still run old Java, Windows XP and even COBOL. We had persistence really, really long time ago, and now frontenders reinvent it and call it 'immutability'!

We had our tick many, many years ago. It's time for tock. With not only scientific but commercial use of things such as Clojure, CRDTs and maybe Rust lang, we are heading straight to our new big tock, which'll bring us new great problems to solve.

That's how any evolution goes.

Who needs sound technical knowledge to get a good job. Study economics and biology and chemistry and physics and you will get a 6 figure salary job. (Being sarcastic :3)

I am trying to reverse engineer a fingernail hardening device for rapid hardware prototyping (becoming some kind of hardware developer I guess)

Since it is a fucking mess (all cables are black) they've chosen a weird construct to operate microcontroller on 240Vac (seems to be possible and made in very low energy consuming devices) i do not find any datasheet for one of the used products. It would help a lot but no. And messing around with high voltage is no fun.

I'm unsure if this fits as a dev rant since most/all I've read so far are software-related.

Manager said we need to use Queue. Several meetings after then I looked at prototype by 6 senior devs:

A QueueListener connects to RabbitMQ check for payload then *disconnects*;

A TaskProvider in ASP.Net.MVC.Core(whatever it is) listening http and dependency inject that QueuePoller;

A Visual Cron timer calls that http url every 5 minutes.

Wait for it: a set of database tables to store messages for another MessageProcessor.

It’s a XML to CSV file conversion project consists of 43 unique projects under a solution. I did it within 500 lines of Node with ElasticSearch and told we don’t use fancy new stuffs here.

For my design thesis I'm gonna design a banking app for kids. And i'd like to have a look at competitors apps screendesign.
Is it possible to open android and/or iphone apps in android studio/xcode in order to have a look at the screen designs?

Because I'm no kid or parent so getting accsess the legit way is out of question.

Classmate from final year of computer engineering class: my computer is acting strange, I think I'm gonna have to give it a formation.

😧

Fried two devices today by simply connecting them to a power source.

Changed nothing in the circuitry, no shorts due to solder residues (a simple modification was made), no changes in the input parameters. Check.

The afromentioned devices should have only minor HW changes compared to a previous version I'm working with and as far as I can see absolutely nothing which should cause the damn microcontroller to release smoke like a steam train. (All right, a very miniature steam train.)

So the only significant difference might be the firmware which I didn't check yet but will tomorrow. Not my code and the corresponding IDE just basically sucks. Yay.

On the other hand, the Software part finally feels like I'm getting somewhere. It seems just ... to work. Very suspicious.

Feeling ambivalently frustrated and relieved at the same time. Sigh.

When my software engineering faculty asks me to code in Microsoft Visio😡

Load a medium post. Wait for the entire junk to download. Or stop the loading if you just want to read the text content

But Medium has other ideas. Hook to the cancel event, show a useless page which only has the reload link. And why would it trigger the HTTP 500 status code to be sent? 🤔

What does a job as a Software Developer Feels like ?
( I was wondering what tasks are exactly needed to be done when you're finally employed as a Software Developer proficient in one or more programming languages. )

Have a Nice day ;)

Recipe for reverse engineering data structures / binary formats:

1℅ understanding the theory.
1℅ expections about what you will find.
3% luck.
45% trial and error.
50℅ persistence.

Reverse engineering a USB device driver I already have the source for because apparently it runs on Donald Trumps hair magic.

Should I switch from Electrical Engineering to Comp Sci?

I am about to start my second semester at college. I took programming 101 and realized I might like coding more than engineering. All the classes I have taken are inside the Comp Sci. Courses in my university so I would not be losing time if I switch now.
Also I started messing around with Android Studio with some friends and that made me realize how easy comparison it is to make a good portfolio and have sideprojects.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Quality work, Fast work, Happy Engineers. . . Pick 2

Trying to understand why do I have a course on Software Engineering which consists 80% of lectures on what Agile and Scrum mean.

Why can't we get to implement a project and work on agile as we go? 😐😣

When you are trying to reverse engineering context free grammar rules from given sentences......
Not possible. Worst assignment yet.

I want to read a good Software Engineering book. A modern one, which contains new agile approaches, useful diagrams, etc. Not the classical, not so useful, class diagram.

What do you recommend? I'm currently more into web and mobile apps, and I want to be able to describe my backend and frontend with useful diagrams which describe better to users and other developers my desired design.

So I reverse engineered the
protocol of QONQR: World in Play and made a mitmproxy addon running locally inside termux that can see when I launch in the game and uses Termux:API to notify me when my ingame resources are replenished.
I direct the traffic through mitmproxy using Drony. I configured it so that by default Drony passes traffic directly to the internet except if it comes from the QONQR app.
The problem is that while Drony is running, there is a chance of network traffic being corrupted so I often get spammed by connection and ssl errors.
So I have to either continue sacrificimg my network integrity or stop getting assistance ppaying QONQR :-/

Does anyone know an alternative to Drony (basically an app that can connect you to a proxy without root using the android vpn api, if possible with filtering by app or ip)?
Also does anyone else have problems with drony on Android 9 or other versions? I don't really have an opportunity to test it.

Edit: It only took 4 tries to post this yay

what does "software engineering" even mean anymore

Sorry to break your heart but if u have 3yrs of expert here is no way you are a senior software engineer, no matter how good you are

I read alot of rants where people describe that they had to implement things they know were wrong and later the boss complained about it although its what he said.

My requirements engineering professor always told us to document everything. Every change made to the requirements must have the source and the reason written down. Idealy with some sort of signature from the boss.

But i understand its not always that easy or done. Which is kinda sad.

!Rant
Software is grown, not built. -- Bill de hÓra

How about dfox and trogus do an episode on software engineering daily?

Most fun i had was reverse engineering lg tone & talk where my headset would vibrate and talk to me on deployments or when something happened

Tl;dr Why would someone preconfigure a hardware raid on a server AND NOT TELL ME?

Recently we got a refurbished server that has some nice specs and works quite well. It had six 2.5 bays and came with two 248gb HDDs. But it only included 2 rails, so we needed more, and we got more.

I installed windows on it (yes, some of the software we use is windows only), and for some odd reason the forth HDD (this was the second one that was pre shipped) wouldn't show up in the disk management, which was odd especially considering the fact that the SAS did detect it, and would get pissed at me if I took it out. I was in a rush so I left it alone for then.

I had needed to setup a raid for these, and while I was trying to figure out what was wrong, I noticed that windows can do a software raid so I set it up on the third HDD (which is the first pre included HDD). I haven't actually used it yet.

At some point I stated to mess with the HDD that wasn't showing up (switching them around, etc.), when I noticed that windows saw the raid was setup on both of the HDDs, which made me wonder what was going on.

So I decided to check the SAS to see if there was something wrong there, as it was booting, bios let me know that there was a raid that was in the process of rebuilding, so then I thought "oh cool, windows actually does a hardware raid!" Well actually it doesn't, as I was looking I saw that this raid was only setup on the two HDDs that were acting funny, and therefore it was only coming up as one device in windows. I wasted an hour trying to find that!

I haven't coded a new project in a long time. I want to build something, show it to the world and hope people use it. I love webapps as I'm pretty experienced in this, and have a huge interest for smart homes, internet of things, twilio, innovative payments and more. What could my MVP be?

What is the most underrated and hyped part of being a software engineer?

I just bought "Code Complete", "Design Patterns", and "The Pragmatic Programmer". Any advice on reading them?

No, friends and family, just because I code doesn't mean I'm a software engineer, or "in IT" and no, websites don't resize themselves to fit mobile devices with fekin magic, that's what we do as web devs, we MAKE that magic