I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

Dear Microsoft Kusto Query Language (KQL)

Screw you. You suck like more than a sudden depressurization event in an airplane. Creating your own freaking query language is bad, the people who invented SQL based it on a the principles of mathematical relational algebra, which although confusing, and not suited for all use cases is at least consistent.

You were invented by a bunch of oxygen deprived halfwits based on the principles of sadism and incompetence.

The only situation in which I would voluntarily use KQL as my tool of choice is if my purpose was to extract a Dantesque style revenge on someone who had committed grievous harm to myself and my family members. In that case forcing them to work with you day in and day out would still border on cruel and unusual punishment.

Sincerely, A developer who has spent the past 2 hours dealing with your Lovecraftian madness.

P.S. I hope you choke on a raw chicken bone and no one gives you CPR.

So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash

Times I have run into event loop / closure related issues in my 10+ years of JavaScript app development: 0

Times I have run into event loop / closure related issues in my 10+ years of interviewing: Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

SHEESH

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

I feel very anxious when developers interviewing me asks
1. is nodejs single threaded or multithreaded ?
2. How does node handle requests
3. How do u manage concurrency
4. What is event emitter and callback.

Dude i have given you my resume, without knowing these things i could never do that ?

I feel the discussion must be based on concepts and general problem solving rather than focusing on one technology. Tech can always be learnt.

This virtual recap 2021 year event could have been an email

!dev just posting here because i need to get this out. depressing post.

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april is going shitty for me and people around me.

1. the worst come when i lost my cat last Saturday. he was a healthy 1.5 year old boy. on Friday morning he slipped out of terrace door to god knows where. we looked around, called his name, he didn't come. he used to do this often, going away for sometime and return in a few hours, sometimes the next day. but this time he didn't returned .
in the night, my whole family was sleeping and i was watching webseries in my room. it was 2 am and i heard some animal growling voices. when i looked outside, some dogs were throwing some large thing left and right.
i woke my dad , ran there and saw that was my boy. his whole body was intact , but he wasn't even blinking his eye. he was warm, we thought he's alive, we rushed to hospital , but nope, he was dead for atleast an hour. i am in shock about what has happened.
ironically he has another brother who is still with us. just friday we went to the vet with his brother because his brother can't walk(from the birth) but him, he was healthy. all from being the size of a fist to a big healthy cat in 1.5 years, and in a day, gone. :'(

2. in the span of last 7 days, my father has recieved 2 calls about his aunts died. both of them were somewhat distant aunts, but there's a shock feeling nonetheless.

3. this uncle who is a nice family friend, his son committed suicide. he was a young , 26ish, thriving , some tech professional in media industry. they haven't shared the cause yet, but his parents are shattered.

4. my friend was so excited about this trip of his to europe/us . He's a great guy who gets great opportunities, and he was to participate in some eth/blockchain event in eu. his visa was yet to arrive for eu but he was pretty sure about it since he already have a very strong passport (3 us trips) . day before the trip , his passport arrives with a rejected visa.

5. another friend had a breakup after an 11 year relationship. this guy is awesome, last month we all went on an amazing trip that he planned impromptu because her gf had to give an exam on that touristy place.

i am feeling shitty and frustrated. every next news i hear, its something bad. hope this ugly phase ends soon

My TL has his custom rules to format code, we use python and black as formatter, still, We have to remember his rules. He forced us to mention type rather than compiler do it for us. Our pr will not be approved until we do this.
My point is if you want to follow this then forced it programmatic way, event better use a language which gives this all by default. why we should remember all of these rules. Other team members are also doing the same and I hate those pr comments like there should be two empty lines or the type is missing. He never listens to any of us and takes it on his ego.

Can you give me some tips on how to debug a massive app? (Android app running on android studio which is basically intellij idea).

For example I need to fix a bug where a certain action results in unexpected behaviour.

But oh my god the codebase is so large (mainly architecture is MVVM and rxjava) that searching for the specific place is like searching for a needle in haystack.

For example I added a breakpoint in few places, but I can see only like 4 or 5 last frames in the stack that led to the current action, last frame is a lambda which doesnt help me so frankly Im unable to even track where current event started. I am loosing my mind. I cant even find where the buttonclick action started because everything is reactive and done with observables which can be anywhere.

Any tips on debugging will be appreciated

Someone tell me why you cant put headers in server side event listeners. I had to use "polyfills" just to put authorization headers. I really dont get why they made such an oversight.

Fun Fact: It's physically impossible to run a .bat script on a remote Windows machine as admin from a Visual Studio post-build event.

So the next Flutter event is on December 4th which means Flutter 1.0 is around the corner. Flutter is amazing with a very neat idea it has ReactJS like state management and everything is a Widget even the app itself. So i was thinking what else could we expect? React Native has Flutter, but what about React JS? I think Google might introduce a Competitor for ReactJS something like Flutter Web or FlutterJS which can work on parallel/similar to Flutter but for the web of course, and also maybe give some news on the Fuchsia. What do you think? :)

In most businesses, self-proclaimed full-stack teams are usually more back-end leaning as historically the need to use JS more extensively has imposed itself on back-end-only teams (that used to handle some basic HTML/CSS/JS/bootstrap on the side). This is something I witnessed over the years in 4 projects.

Back-end developers looking for a good JS framework will inevitably land on the triad of Vue, React and Angular, elegant solutions for SPA's. These frameworks are way more permissive than traditional back-end MVC frameworks (Dotnet core, Symfony, Spring boot), meaning it is easy to get something that looks like it's working even when it is not "right" (=idiomatic, unit-testable, maintainable).

They then use components as if they were simple HTML elements injecting the initial state via attributes (props), skip event handling and immediately add state store libraries (Vuex, Redux). They aren't aware that updating a single prop in an object with 1000 keys passed as prop will be nefarious for rendering performance. They also read something about SSR and immediately add Next.js or Nuxt.js, a custom Node express.js proxy and npm install a ton of "ecosystem" modules like webpack loaders that will become abandonware in a year.

After 6 months you get: 3 basic forms with a few fields, regressions, 2MB of JS, missing basic a11y, unmaintainable translation files & business logic scattered across components, an "outdated" stack that logs 20 deprecation notices on npm install, a component library that is hard to unit-test, validate and update, completely vendor-& version locked in and hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars.

I empathize with the back-end devs: JS frameworks should not brand themselves as "simple" or "one-size-fits-all" solutions. They should not treat their audience as if it were fully aware and able to use concepts of composition, immutability, and custom "hooks" paired with the quirks of JS, and especially WHEN they are a good fit.

Our lead frontend dev insists on using <select> as a dropdown for a language switcher in the navbar of a website and then make the page redirect to the localized url using the onChange event with JS.

Am I wrong thinking that's just really, really dumb, or am I just dumb?

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

(No punchlines just a rant sorry, very angry at this person. Can't leave the club. Talked to seniors about it. Talked to coworkers for some voluntary help. No help here ;-;)

Yesterday: we need to have a meet to plan things out. 3 PM?

Rainbow eating monster: Yes

Yesterday 5 PM: Reminder

Rainbow shitting monster: I can't I have important things

Yesterday 5:01 PM: Children eating monster (in group): hey yall watching the event going on rn

Yesterday 5:02 PM: is this what you're busy with?

Rabbit pooping monster: this of course I can't miss. And anyways I have 5 more things to do: thing that I've already done, this club meet that you asked me to do yesterday and I said I'd have done, a meet with a friend, I'm having lunch now, and a meet with you. Hence I can't meet with you.

...

Today (in group): Kidney stealing monster: @me (irrelevant to discussion) can you meet for other thing that *I* was supposed to do a week ago?
Will you be available @me at 5 PM?
Okay everyone, assuming @me is available, tentatively we meet at 5 PM.

Today 12 PM: i wake up to this faeces

I have to use SQL event to check if in the "plots" has specific building, and update the gold/iron/stone... by the specific amount that building produces. This is how the Gold mine creates slowly gold. I am not sure this is OK like this, please I need advice.

WTF I just found out I have to add slides to the slide deck for Friday’s department meeting. Event has been on the books for a month and they send a “reminder” email that’s actually a first notice for me. Well not my problem because I have PTO scheduled already. My manager is going to present on my behalf.

I can't google jargon, what do you call it when you "flip" a function call, such that the call becomes an event in some dispatch system and return becomes a call on the event? I had to implement five such APIs this week with surface level differences and I'm starting to feel like it has to have a name if it's this popular.

For the pedantic, I mean async calls in JS in particular, I know you can't just invert a synchronous function call that uses a stack without peek.

How i want to program the gui:
There's code that draws the gui and then other code listens to user input and then updates state and gui code.
How I'm supposed to code Gui:
Write custom gui classes that are tightly coupled with the data for "easier" binding and updating.
Or
Write a complicated functional monstrosity that updates all the state at once so every time there is an event an entire new object has to be created and you also need to manually route all the events and side effects.