Developer (master's degree, -bleeping- smart guy, no kidding) was bragging on how he made a piece of code 3x faster (with the usual pinch that the original dev was incompetent) and spent nearly 6 weeks working on it (wrote his own parallel-foreach library because Microsoft's parallel library was "too slow").
I was the original dev and he didn't know I had my own performance counters where I broke down each stack (database access, network I/O, and the code logic).
Average time was around 5ms (yes milliseconds) and worst case was around 10 seconds. His '3x improvement' was based on the worst test case, which improved by about a second. Showed our boss my graph (laughed out loud, said 'WTF', other curse words) and the dev hasn't spoken to me in weeks (I say 'hi' in the hall and he keeps walking)
Take that master's degree and high IQ and shove it.

You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

I mean, how are so high paid guys with so great ideas manage to come up with apis THAT shitty?

Let's have a look. They took MVC and invented flux. It was so complicated that there were so many overhyped articles that stated "Flux is just X", "Flux is just Y", and exactly when Redux comes to the stage, flux is forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore.

They took declarative cursors and created Relay, but again, Apollo GraphQL comes and relay just goes away. When i tried just to get started with relay, it seemed so complicated that i just closed the tab. I mean, i get the idea, it's simple yet brilliant, but the api...

Immutable.js. Shitload of fuck. Explain WHY should i mess with shit like getIn(path: Iterable<string | number>): any and class List<T> { push(value: T): this }? Clojurescript offers Om, the React wrapper that works about three times faster! How is it even possible? Clojure's immutable data structures! They're even opensourced as standalone library, Mori js, and api is great! Just use it! Why reinvent the wheel?

It seems like when i just need to develop a simple react app, i should configure webpack (huge fuckload of work by itself) to get hot reload, modern es and jsx to work, then add redux, redux-saga, redux-thunk, react-redux and immutable.js, and if i just want my simple component to communicate with state, i need to define a component, a container, fucking mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps, and that's all just for "hello world" to pop out. And make sure you didn't forget to type that this.handler = this.handler.bind(this) for every handler function. Or use ev closure fucked up hack that requires just a bit more webpack tweaks. We haven't even started to communicate to the server! Fuck!

I bet there is savage ass overengineer sitting there at facebook, and he of course knows everything about how good api should look, and he also has huge ass ego and he just allowed to ban everything that he doesn't like. And he just bans everything with good simple api because it "isn't flexible enough".

"React is heavier than preact because we offer isomorphic multiple rendering targets", oh, how hard want i to slap your face, you fuckface. You know what i offered your mom and she agreed?

They even created create-react-app, but state management is still up to you. And react-boierplate is just too complicated.

When i need web app, i type "lein new re-frame", then "lein dev", and boom, live reload server started. No config. Every action is just (dispatch) away, works from any component. State subscription? (subscribe). Isolated side-effects? (reg-fx). Organize files as you want. File size? Around 30k, maybe 60 if you use some clojure libs.

If you don't care about massive market support, just use hyperapp. It's way simpler.

Dear developers, PLEASE, don't forget about api. Take it serious, it's very important. You may even design api first, and only then implement the actual logic. That's even better.

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

Do you ever feel coding fatigue?

My dev mana has run dry, I've hit my rate limit.

That moment where your brain thinks "I should finish building this React project, it's good for my portfolio" or "I should really work on fixing this query performance issue, I already know what the problem is" — but your stomach churns at the thought of having to interpret even a single line of code?

The last few days it really does feel like a physical illness, a nauseated feeling whenever I open an IDE. I have written about 12 lines of code since Monday.

It goes beyond writer's block, it's not a lack of focus or inspiration, it's a big knot in my head of everything that's wrong and inconsistent in development, and it causes feelings of dread, desperation and revulsion when trying to wrap my head around the simplest stuff.

Does anyone have good tips to overcome this feeling, something faster and less savings-account-destroying than "take a sabbatical year and travel the world riding an emu"? (seems tempting though)

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

I am done with people, I just want one single room, with good internet, dual monitor setup... And I can spend my whole life like that... Being social, fuck that shit... I have devRant for that... and rest, I just want to code, listen to music, drink coffee and sleep like hell...

Why is it that I can understand some other dev's code faster that understanding someone's feelings. Why is it that I am good with principles of Programming Languages, but not the basic Principles of Humanity... Yes, I agree I don't have feelings, but is it wrong not to have feelings, I am a dev, I am supposed to be good with Codes, not humans... I want to be in my small space of close people. (My family), and that's it... I am no good with others. I hate Facebook, but love devRant, I spend more time on StackOverflow than that on WhatsApp. Why is it so... Why

About two years ago I get roped into a something when someone was requesting an $8000 laptop to run an "program" that they wrote in Excel to pull data from our mainframe.

In reality they are using our normal application that interacts with the mainframe and screen scrapping it to populate several Excel spreadsheets.

So this guy kept saying that he needed the expensive laptop because he needed the extra RAM and processing power for his application. At the time we only supported 32 bit Windows 7 so even though I told him ten times that the OS wouldn't recognize more than 3.5 GB of RAM he kept saying that increasing the RAM would fix his problem. I also explained that even if we installed the 64 bit OS we didn't have approval for the 64 bit applications.

So we looked at the code and we found that rather than reusing the same workbook he was opening a new instance of a workbook during each iteration of his loop and then not closing or disposing of them. So he was running out of memory due to never disposing of anything.

Even better than all of that, he wanted a faster processor to speed up the processing, but he had about 5 seconds of thread sleeps in each loop so that the place he was screen scrapping from would have time to load. So it wouldn't matter how fast the processor was, in the end there were sleeps and waits in there hard coded to slow down the app. And the guy didn't understand that a faster processor wouldn't have made a difference.

The worst thing is a "dev" that thinks they know what they are doing but they don't have a clue.

This is what I found in the logs:
3280546 I had a cup of tea and now it's fixed
9daaf6c copy and paste is not a design pattern
958ca5b It compiles! Ship it!
a9edf8d LAST time, Masahiro, /dev/urandom IS NOT a variable name generator...
438072f 640K ought to be enough for anybody
1fb839b Too lazy to write descriptive message
4d70890 ...
d6ce0c8 Ugh. Bad rebase.
a00b544 Programming the flux capacitor
49715cb Fix my stupidness
4babf07 Do things better, faster, stronger
49b3a7b SEXY RUSSIAN CODES WAITING FOR YOU TO CALL
12c7b55 formatted all
2658c87 and so the crazy refactoring process sees the sunlight after some months in the dark!
2376c89 - Temporary commit.
a83220a I honestly wish I could remember what was going on here...
3347007 work in progress
3382b4c well crap.
109748a Glue. Match sticks. Paper. Build script!
c3f025e Useful text
70394e7 Who knows WTF?!
0d78f14 breathe, =, breathe
5344e39 removed tests since i can't make them green
8a3a6bf better grepping
2777cc4 first blush
cf620ff Continued development...
9591c19 Too lazy to write descriptive message
767e0cd Some shit.
763602a Yes, I was being sarcastic.
8d7a602 /sigh
c6296e5 rats

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.

Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.

You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.

I spent yesterday refactoring a JavaScript file and it was so fucking bad that I wasn't containing my frustration to the point it git blamed it to make sure I wasn't "wtfing" my boss's code, I wasn't so I went on a rampage.

Anyone who looked at me yesterday would see a pissed off dev with the highest rate of wtf/minute to the screen gesturing and force palming constantly.

I'm a back end dev.
I made a front end code have 90% (?!?!?!) less code, more readable and I can say for sure 10x faster.

There was a fucking setTimeout() with 5 seconds delay to do something that doesn't even need to wait...

Fuck this shit lol.

Start-up: hires 3 junior devs to save money.

Start-up: expects things to get done faster-- BUT-- Start-up keeps adding things to the TO-DO list and backlog-- i.e. it's all relative!!

Start-up: gets angry at 3 junior devs why they can't deliver when they keep adding tasks and ask we fall behind.

Dev team: "Seriously? You hire more devs to finish tasks faster, but you keep adding more than are being finiahed-- obviously it's gonna take longer now regardless"

Git --pull life together

My brother made a PC game for his game dev class.

You are a hamster with a hammer
- acorns drop and u crack them for points
- you have to avoid rolling logs and eagles that swoop down
- the game gets faster

Dad: I just played the game, I think it has potential like Angry Birds, can you convert it to Android?

Me: no and no
Dad: why and why?
Me: **facepalm and takes a deep breath**

Explains why very simply and that I'm not a game dev... And if he thinks it's that good, go pay for a freelancer...

Not having finished any education, and writing code during interviews.

I have a pretty nice resume with good references, and I think I'm a reasonably good & experienced dev.

But I'm absolutely unable to write code on paper, and really wonder how some devs can just write out algorithms using a pen and reason about it, without trying/failing/playing/fixing in an IDE.

Education I think.

I can transform the theory on a complex Wikipedia page about math/algorithm into code, I can translate a Haskell library into idiomatic python... but what I haven't done is write out sorting functions or fibonacci generators a million times during Java class.

I don't see the point either... but I still feel utterly worthless during an interview if they ask "So you haven't even finished highschool? Can you at least solve this prime number problem using a marker on this whiteboard? Could you explain in words which sorting algorithm is faster and why?"

"Uh... let me fetch a laptop with an IDE, stackoverflow and Wikipedia?"

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Meanwhile at HTC:
Dev: Just gonna tweak this function to make our keyboard faster!
Dev: ha! Done, users will love this update

Non-dev activity that made me a better dev?

That's an easy one.

Playing the piano. Or better: learning to play the piano.

(With the help of my teacher) I developed many skills that help me learn faster and I learned how to properly use and organize my time.

Dev: This could be sooooo easily optimized...

Me: Uhm. Don't think so. What's your idea?

Dev: Just use threads.

Me: Nope. Problem requires 3 shared resources per process step, it won't be faster by threading. Shared resource will only lead to locking contention, decreasing performance.

Dev: I don't think that will happen. Can you PROOF to ME that this will happen?

Me: It was your suggestion, so you should proof me wrong. Nice try, but no thanks.

Dev: Yeah, but it's too slow and it should run faster.

Me: If you cannot find a better approach than the current one, it runs as fast as it can while providing correct results. That's not slow. That's just working as intended and designed.

Dev: Yeah, but it's still slow.

....

You know these conversations where you just wanna rip some people's face off, stick it in the shit hole they use to talk and toss them out of the window....

Yeah. Had those conversations today.

Manager: I don’t understand what is so complicated about this feature. Under a certain set of conditions do one thing, under a separate set of conditions do another. It’s just an if else statement! Those take seconds to write!

Dev: The problem is the memory required to calculate the conditions is quite cumbersome

Manager: Well then find a faster way! It’s just an if else!

Dev: …

Manager: *taps dev on shoulder* Hey I noticed a minor bug I think

Dev: Sigh…. So then create a ticket for it

Manager: Can’t you just fix it right now?

Dev: I can but I’m currently working on that other issue you told everyone was “top priority” at the morning status meeting. Should I switch to actioning this minor bug instead?

Manager: Don’t switch just multitask and work faster!

Dev: …

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

Manager: You know you really shouldn’t pay off your mortgage faster than you absolutely have to. It’s the cheapest money you’ll ever get!

Dev: I’d rather work towards being debt free. Besides my RRSP (401k) is already maxed out

Manager: RRSPs are a scam! TFSAs (Roth IRAs) are way better

Dev: My TFSA is maxed out too

Manager: 😡 You still shouldn’t pay off your mortgage!

Dev: …

Long rant...

*Designer Posted image of newly designed layout for our app on trello.

Dev 1 (me, being the junior, on ios) : so... What's the size for x, Y, z, a, B, C?

She: it's 9 for the small text, 10 for sub title, 12 for main title.

*shows her the design on app
Dev 1: seems too small

She: just make it to look not small.

Dafug?

*finishes the app layout for that screen.
*working on next screen

Dev 1: your new design is for the screen of 1920x1080. But our supported screen size starts from 320 width. So there'll be text overlapping each other and ui might screw up.

She: uh.. Just... Put those that will overlap to the next line.

*shrugs
Dev 1: ok
=======
2 days later
Dev 2 (senior, working on Android)
Dev 2: so... What's the colour for x, Y, z

*Dev 1 laughs on the inside because of the struggles we have with her.

Dev 1 to Dev 2: is it common for her not to follow the design guidelines?

Dev 2: yeah man.. We just have to adapt her design into our app guidelines.

*sigh

Dev 2: there's a new icon here on this screen, so you wanna change the icon? Can I have the icon file?

She: oh.. No.. Use back the old one, because I just copy and paste.

Dev 1: so... This progress bar of yours, doesn't show its background colour, because you filled it already. So what's the background colour if the bar isn't filled?

She : hmm.... Oh.. Well.. Maybe try x.. ? *doesn't look nice* how about Y? *doesn't look nice* how about...

Me : why not you try in your computer first instead of me changing it here by code, it's much faster this way.

*seriously, wth?

Dev 1 and 2: there's additional text in your new design, what is it for?

She : oh.. No no. I copied extra due to copy and paste. Just ignore it.

Dev 1 and 2: what's the spacing gap between x and Y? And how about the size of the box?

She : oh.. I just estimate it, and for the box, not sure either, you can follow old design, because I'm just putting a box there for illustration purpose.

Mother fickle, what fuck man.

Dev 1 and 2: *flips table.
*we didn't, but.. It's freaking annoying.

When your app run smoothly, but your boss dislike it because "loading media content is too slow".
Then you explain him that those content are downloaded, so having a slow connection means that content will load slowly.
"So? Make internet faster, you're the dev"

Ah the day before launch of a new app. And right on schedule the businesses is attempting to completely alter their requirements including a COMPLETE OVERHAUL OF THE DATABASE MODEL TO ADDRESS AN ISSUE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN FIXED. I wish they would share the drugs they are clearly on so I could also live in this dreamland delusion where you can turn something completely on its head right on the finish line and expect everything to go well.

Manager: Hey I think I have a solution to that performance we talked about last week

Dev: I already fixed it, it only takes 1 second instead of 30 now.

Manager: Ok but I’ve also figured out a solution. If we completely change the entire database model that one query could potentially be even faster according to my understanding of how databases operate.

Dev: I fixed it without the need for that, actually it was just a matter of better conc—

Manager: I think we should go with MY solution. Drop everything and restructure the database immediately! Be quick, as you know we launch this application tomorrow! Have an extra coffee today and just crush it out, don’t overthink this either just do it.

Dev: …

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

We were 6 devs on a big project that needed to be completed in 3 months. Probably my first project as a full-stack dev and the work was very demanding.

The senior of my team was a very sharp and energetic, but also a very "in your face" kinda guy. Like, he was cool, but sometimes a little too much to handle for some people.

Anyway, this guy "Senior dev" worked faster (naturally) and harder than the rest of us and was always willing to help if somebody had problems with a framework, tool or other technology. Also, there was this other guy also a good dev (second best I would say) that just hated the first guy's guts for being "rude and obnoxious" as he put it.

One day, the PM and the senior had an argument about a major change that the PM had agreed to (just to save face with the client) that will force the team to come to work on the weekend. In the end he saved us the trouble of going throught that and the PM had to tell the client that the change wouldn't be made. From then on it went downhill for "Sr. dev" in the company. Until one day he was told that his contract was not gonna be renewed.

Short after, he showed some of us a screen cap. somebody sent him of an email from the "hateful" dev to the PM in which he wrote he had heard that the senior guy was leaving and he couldn't be happier because he was "damaging, problematic and a stressful part of his job". That was such a dick move, we thought he should get back at the guy.

So he sent a fake email to the PM using the "hateful" guy's email ID, that read:

"Dear PM. I'm sorry I said those things about 'Senior dev', I guess I'm just mad that he's a better professional than me and mad that I was born with no genitalia".

After the senior dev left I worked on one more project with the "hateful" dev and he was let go mid project for "not being proactive and making little effort on completing the project".

Am I the only one ?

15+ years in c# / .net dev and I still google "c# string compare ignore case" each time. Its just fucking faster than to remember exact syntax of the "StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase"

Visual studio (2017), since I switched to C# and visual studio I'd never go back, my dev life became so much better, enjoyable, faster and easier ❤

!dev

I'm just fucking glad this day is over

* less than 3h of sleep thanks to insomnia
* unable to get breakfast
* unable to concentrate at work
* Almost falling asleep
* Lunch was not even enough to sate my hunger
* Accidentally upset a good friend because I cannot communicate well in general, but even worse when tired
* Get something snitched away from my by cutting in line
* get told by said person that I should have reacted faster
* get told by said person that they'll sell me the the thing that was supposed to be mine in the first place
* get a half assed apology when they saw that they made me mad (still keeping mentioned item)
* Don't get to meet up with friend for workout
* Get home and don't even wanna do anything

Yepp.. The older you get, the faster the time flies by. Remember how long days used to be when you were 10? How much you used to do then? And now? You barely skim through your emails and it's already lunch time.. And soon after that it's already time to go home, go to sleep. And the next day is the same. Round robin, round robin... And when you think that the pooft-you're-gone moment is approaching faster and faster every year, you wonder what are you leaving behind, to remember you by.. A few dev projects that will drown to oblivion a few years after you're out, a few modules in other projects that will live longer but your code lines will soon be overwritten and forgotten in git's history, where noone ever scrolls to. Your own projects you have never released. Your fam who will remember you until their grandchildren - after that older generations are forgotten...

What is it that will keep people saying your name after you're gone? What significant have you given to the life?

Not an enemy yet, but I’ve just debated with a senior dev that said stored procedure is faster, safer, and works better than entity framework

I agree with faster (only a bit) but the rest is just bs

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

There was a sales manager who was raked with overseeing me and another dev finish a last minute request project. He said at one point to the other dev that he was mad at developers because we understood something that he would never understand.

This same manager would often sit in on estimation meetings and constantly say that we were estimating too high and needed to come up with faster solutions. When we would offer him with caveats of possible technical debt or unintended side-effects/performance issues, he'd want us to go with that solution. He would then complain that we were always wanting to work on technical debt and that our application was slow. He would also ask for very high level estimates for large, unscoped features/apps without any meaningful level of detail, then hold us to the high-level estimated date even after revealing additional features previously unmentioned.

We learned to never compromise on the right solution and to push back hard on dates without proper scoping. They didn't learn, so I and most of the good devs left.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

I was checking out this wk139 rants & thinking to myself how does one have a dev enemy.. o.O Well TIL that maaaaybe I have one too..

Not sure if ex coworker was a bit 'weird & unskillful' or wanted to intentionally harm us and thank god failed miserably..

I decided to finally cleanup his workspace today: he had a bad habit of having almost all files in solution checked out to himself, most of them containing no changes whatsoever... I reminded him on many occasions that this is bad practice & to only have checked out files he was currently working on. And never checkin files without changes.. Ofc didn't listen.. managed to checkin over 100 files one time, most of which had no changes & some even had alerts for debugging in them.. which ofc made it to the client server.. :/

On one or two occasions I already logged in and wanted to check if files have any real changes that I'd actually want to keep, but gave up after 40 or so files in a batch that were either same or full of sh..

Anyhow today I decided I will discard everything, as the codebase changed a lot since he left an I know I already fixed a lot of his tasks.. I logged in, did the undo pending changes and then proceed to open source control explorer.

While I was cleaning up his workspace, I figured I could test what will happen if I request changeset xy and shelveset yy, will it be ok, or do I have to modify something else & merge code.. Figured using his workspace that was already set up for testing would be easier, faster & less 'stressful' than creating another one on my computer, change IIS settings and all just, to test this merge..

Boy was I wrong.. upon opening source control explorer, I was greeted by a lot of little red Xes staring back at me... more than half the folders on TFS were marked for deletion.. o.O

Now I'm not sure if he wanted to fuck me up when he left or was just 'stupid' when it comes to TFS. O.O

So...maybe I do have a dev enemy after all.. or I don't.. Can't decide.. all I know for sure is tomorrow I'm creating another workspace to test this and I'm not touching his computer ever again.. O.O

It's a job description for an entry level Software Developer role at Apple.

Basically they want
- A Front end dev
- A back end dev
- An iOS expert
- A Gimp/photoshop designer
- A streaming data expert
- An Oracle/Teradata expert
- A Kafka expert ( Not shown in the picture)

And on top of that the guy should be able to learn new tech faster.

Do they want a developer or a fucking terminator?

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

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.

Me and the unofficial CTO (3rd party's CTO) are interviewing an ios dev. (I'm an android dev, btw)

CTO: In your view, would you find developing an ios app would be faster or at the same speed as an android dev?

Me: *shock*

Canidate: I've never developed on Android before, but I'd think it would be the same speed. We both need to make screens, views, and type code.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Ad an Android dev, I hate that hybrid solution like cordova, react native or similar frameworks. Companies sell their apps for ridicolous prices, so every native Android/ios dev need to get it's work faster and for a lower price.
Customers can't understand that hybrid app are faster to create but works worse. I'm hating you, hybrid-guys

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

I was reluctant to try out flutter earlier on because of claims online stating that hybrid frameworks aren't there yet. That's one hell of a crap!
I fell in love with flutter after completing my first flutter app. Shit was just too easy. So many helpful libraries which has eased my overall workload lately.
We built a Native Android app which took 2months+ to complete and I just finished porting it to flutter for iOS and Android in 3 weeks. Boss was happy, Client was happy, I am freaking joyous, everybody is happy!

From the mouth of a Native Android Dev with over 5yr of exp. This shit called flutter is worthy of all the hype. I fucking kid you not!

I don't know about the past... I assume it was shitty then cus I also blasted it based on git issues but now it seems even more faster to build production worthy apps than anything I've encountered.

!dev

Guys, we need talk raw performance for a second.

Fair disclaimer - if you are for some reason intel worker, you may feel offended.

I have one fucking question.
What's the point of fucking ultra-low-power-extreme-potato CPUs like intel atoms?

Okay, okay. Power usage. Sure. So that's one.

Now tell me, why in the fucking world anyone would prefer to wait 5-10 times more for same action to happen while indeed consuming also 5-10 times less power?

Can't you just tune down "big" core and call it a day? It would be around.. a fuckton faster. I have my i7-7820HK cpu and if I dial it back to 1.2Ghz my WINDOWS with around lot of background tasks machine works fucking faster than atom-powered freaking LUBUNTU that has only firefox open.

tested i7-7820hk vs atom-x5-z8350.

opening new tab and navigating to google took on my i7 machine a under 1 second, and atom took almost 1.5 second. While having higher clock (turbo boost)

Guys, 7820hk dialled down to 1.2 ghz; 0.81v
Seriously.
I felt everything was lagging. but OS was much more responsive than atom machine...

What the fuck, Intel. It's pointless. I think I'm not only one who would gladly pay a little bit more for such difference.

i7 had clear disadvantages here, linux vs windows, clear background vs quite a few processes in background, and it had higher f***ng clock speed.

TL;DR
Intel atom processors use less power but waste a lot of time, while a little bit more power used on bigger cpu would complete task faster, thus atoms are just plain pointless garbage.

PS.
Tested in frustration at work, apparently they bought 3 craptops for presentations or some shit like that and they have mental problems becouse cheapest shit on market is more shitty than they anticipated ;-;
fucking seriously ;-;

Novice seeking advice, how do you indie/solo dev guys manage your time and productivity to stay clear on what to prioritize and deliver faster ?

As a .NET dev I get questioned about using VS Code in favor of full-blown VS. My arguments are that it is faster, lightweight and overall more user-friendly.

I use it exclusively, for all types of files and projects (JSON, SQL, Angular projects, .NET Core, ...)

Do you guys like using VS Code as well? What do you use it for?

Also, if you ever want to annoy a colleague, try associating all file extensions with Visual Studio and watch him go bonkers.

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

I'm so fucking done with all the hate the modern web is getting. If you don't need it, don't use it. Shut the fuck up if somebody else uses it, because he needs it.
And that whole war between libraries is so fucking ridiculous. Why do I have to feel bad for using a tool that does exactly what I want, and provides me a great dev experience.
No I am not going to use a stack of 4 technologies because "native is faster". Fuck you. I don't care, and you shouldn't either.

I shouldn't even have the need to rant about this, but I'm just in this constant rut, because I feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm doing it wrong. I hate it.

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

Holly shit, they will never understand....

If you come to dev, minding his buissness, writing some code, beeing focused, with headphones on, etc. You absolutely destroy his cache of things in mind, you stay next to him gazing at his screen and throwing away madly words that you need some data extracted from database NOW and you will stay standing next to him gazing when he quickly types few lines of ultra-wide screen of SQL querry with all the fucking joins and shit you wanted with exac aliases you understand and makes one typo but query executes and spits out some data. He didn't notice that something is wrong with it becouse he didn't memorize database's data, and he sends it to you.

Now you are coming back to him pissed and in general fighting mood becouse he did one fucking typo when you was actively pressurizing him to make fucking query faster while you absolutely destroyed his flow of work (in meaning he now needs to dive back into code, figure out why he was editing given file and what was idea for further structure)

Now you are standing again next to him and absolutely pissing him off that he fucked up and made one fucking typpo that unfortnately database didn't say "nope" but it instead spit out wrong data.

If you can relate to "you" stated above, sincerly fuck you.
If you can relate to "he" stated above, I feel ya man, its fucking annoying, isn't it?

This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.

Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).

But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.

So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.

The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.

Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.

I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.

I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

If there was an anime Based on developers.

==Start===

Dev : here comes my favorite browser.
Mouse : No, not until I'm here.
Hand : whattttt? What's happening??
Mind : oh NO!! I why's Internet Explorer is loading?!?

Faster Mind : it's mouse, he's behind all this. Only he's powerful enough to pull off something like this.

Time : Developer-san SAVE me!!
IE : it's too late now, if you do anything it will just slow everything down!!! Hahahah

Dev : No it won't, don't ever underestimate a true developer. It's not over yet!!
*Some keyboard key combination

Time : *screams* developerrr-saaaan!!
Hand : wait, I know it, it's happening. We can still save Time-chan.

IE : WHAT!! No, it can't be!!

Dev : here comes Ctrl+Alt+Del. Be gone....

IE : Nooooooooooooo, this isn't happening, Aaaaaa *dead*

Hand : we did it!!!

Recruiter answered me

Rejected

They decided to choose another candidate because... [the reason will be announced at the end of this rant]

...

I was working on my project

I am learning new tech

And shitting 10 times a day from these jobs and recruiters, the usual me

HE the recruiter contacted me a few days ago

HE offered me nodejs position

I AM the one who was HONEST and told him i dont work in nodejs i work in java

HE then continued the conversation

HE offered me a java spring boot backend position

I AM the one who read the requirements

🔥🔥🔥
REQUIREMENTS: 3+ years of experience
🔥🔥🔥

I AM the one who told him i have 5+ years of java spring boot and 8+ years of java experience.

HE said great I'll contact the clients and let them know

TWO WEEKS LATER OF SILENCE

"unfortunately they chose some other candidate because they need someone with 10+ years of experience for this role"

---

Are you fuc

Fucking

Ki

Wasting my Fucking time?

You decide to slam into my peace and offer me a job position with ALL THE REQUIREMENTS I FULFILL, JUST TO RANDOMLY REJECT ME FOR AN INVALID FUCKING REASON?

If i said i had 10 years of experience

They would reject me because i dont have 15+

If i had 15+ years of experience i would get rejected for not having 30+

If i had 30+ years of experience fucking your whole family and bombing them to dust like in palestine till their bones die and worms eat your fucking down syndrome brains, they would say i need 160+ year of experience

Fyck you

Truly.
From the bottom

Of my fucking balls and cum

From my fucking dick

From my fucking shit and asshole

From my vomit

I wish you death.

I wish karma to kill all of their family members (the clients who rejected me) slowly one by one. Final destination accidents type of deaths. Truly i hope you and wish you the worst.

[Here the intro continues]

I will repeat again:
- REQUIREMENTS: 3+ years

I have:
- 8+ years

They rejected me because:
- I don't have 10+ years

I told all of this to recruiter now. Politely but because im losing my patience i was very very passive aggressive with my response. In the context of

1. I TRULY dont give a fuck for your rejection (which is the truth)

2. Your clients are low IQ dumb as fucking retards because they choose people based on the YEARS OF EXPERIENCE

3. Explained him: IF YOU ARE SO FUCKING STUPID TO UNDERSTAND THIS COMMON SENSE, I'LL EXPLAIN IT TO YOU: CHOOSING DEVS SOLELY BASED ON THE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE MEANS YOU ARE FUCKING STUPUD. There are devs with 2 years of experience who are WAY smarter better efficient and more knowledgeable than some devs with 5-7 OR MORE years of experience. Thats because some people progress better faster or more efficiently in 2 years while others need 5 years. Etc. You're fucking stupid as shit for this sole decision

4. Indirectly let him know that i am not pissed off for rejection. I am pissed off for my time being FUCKING WASTED.

5. Also pointed him out: your job description says its looking for a dev with 3+ years of experience i told you i have 8+ and you reject me because I don't have 10+. Are you Fucking stupid? Fuck you. Truly fuck off. Get the fuck off my dick and eat the shits i shit straight out of my asshole. I'll shit in your fucking mouth you fucking bitch. Your wife also probably fucks some other guys while you're at work and she doesnt respect you or love you. In the matter of fact give me your fucking wife/gf and I'll Fucking fuck her to death

To the clients once again: Truly i hope Hamas fires a missile at israel but misses and hits your fucking home and your whole fucking family blows up to atoms and particles. Completely erased from existence.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

Last night I looked at an Android app.
Going to put it bluntly, I don't like java much.

But Android takes it to a whole new level.
I was talking to our (SlimRoms) framework dev about how the database transactions used to take 400ms, and it was cut down to 10ms by, changing to xml with some kind of a reflector (so xml would be saved in the background).
This is atrocious. As a web developer, I live in a world where you can do thousands of transactions in that time (albeit on faster hardware).

So how is it that all of the abstractions in Android add up to a single read/insertion in Android (and I'm talking about an app written by Google) takes 400ms?

Every time I go in that channel to talk to them, I find something screwed up. Gah.

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

My company insists on working in one production environment to save time and every time I try to convince them to set up a work flow with a dev and test environment, they tell me we don't have the time...

Even after I set one up anyway as I'm scared shitless to touch production. They tell me it's faster doing it all in one environment.

They launch an update. Site buggy as hell and doesn't load 90% of the content...

Sigh....

In a recent venture, I had to use an office suite and a photo editing software regularly. As a Linux user, I tried using Libreoffice and gimp. But that was just a mess. My other project partners were using MS office. Format, image alignments, fonts.. everything was messed up. Same happened wih the gimp. I know Photoshop, learnt while studying. Gimp was just no match to that. I was forced to go back to Windows. And I was surprised that the latest MS office and Adobe Creative Cloud were excellent. MS office was smoother and faster than Libreoffice.

I love linux. I have tried all the major distros and I love all of them. But I would still say that Linux is not the best option for day to day non-dev tasks. Whatever Richard Stallman and the Open Source Community say, Linux lack good softwares, at least some good document, photo, audio and video editing softwares.

I really like my position as the head of my department. But I am most definitely hitting walls(and in some way breaking them) concerning the way the CTO(my direct boss) deals with a lot of the things that his management team wants to do.

For example, the previous manager could only do so much in terms of directing a software team since she did not have a formal background in computer science or engineering, thus the developers that she had would tell her the different deals with many things and she would have to take their word for it. Nothing necessarily bad with this, but it just meant that a lot of things could have gone smoother had she the knowledge to fix said items. Whenever she would try to use resources(dev time or such) the CTO will resort to the all powerful manthra of "if it ain't broke don't fix it!".

but it was about more than fixing things that were breaking, our internal services and admin boards were built using all of the WRONG proper development practices, it feels as if they took the book of best practices.....and said fuck it and did whatever the fuck they wanted. It is the worst PHP/Java/JS code I have ever seen in my entire life and the reason why even though I do not concur with it I will always understand the dislike from other developers. Our services look like something that came out from the 90s, no style, no engineering concepts in place, no versioning no testing NADA zip(these are all web based services)

One in particular, it was an admin board used internally to let students evaluate their professors, the entire app is shit, and it was broken, for some UNGODLY reason, the original dev decided to use some weird external libraries he got from some blog somewhere and as such something that would take about 5 or 6 files is now a mess with over 200 php/js files all over the fucking place. The CTO insisted on fixing them, they were all broken, and I continuously told him that redesigning the application would be faster.

Mofo fought me on it, and in the end I did what I wanted and rebuilt the app.

It took me one afternoon. One fucking afternoon, over possibly 2 weeks of fixing it.

See, I am not one to just do whatever he pleases, but I am firm in my belief that if I know a better way I will do it and save precious time. The dude had to agree with me on this and promised to consider this shit on other items that will undoubtedly come up. He was lying out of his ass but oh well..........

W

Its only 5 months left till my graduation,and my mind is getting fucked up.

The current startup i am interning with is a lot stressful and demanding. I am giving my 1000%, only because this is the only place to.. how can i explain..
if world is a race of horses, then i am the tortoise and these guys are the only slow horses that i think i can catch up with. These people are your next door app dev startup, releasing multiple apps fastly and trying to hit the magic recipe. I am not sure if i am learning anything besides how to search stuff on my own and produce faster results. But still, better than nothing.

However i am a far sighted person and am not sure if this is the future that i want.

I am currently giving 14+ hours to this startup as an intern (including all the traveling from home). The only relaxation i could make in future is to shift near the office which will save me 3-4 hours but then what?

I am currently running out of goals. My childhood was shit, but i want to make my youth meaningful.

Leaving my home means leaving the only 2 people (mom/dad) currently present actively in my life.

My college would be over by then, all my colleagues are all on their own ,going into different companies. We don't meet now leave alone meeting then. I am also not much into( or have the time to be into) online games and anime where those guys meet/chat
Not that i was able to gather courage to get into some relationship or talk to people till now. I don't have much talks with my officemate or gals coz 1 :i am so full of work and (2) i simply can't

Currently i spent my whole Saturday sleeping and watching movies and Sunday doing the office work.

Is this going to be my whole working life now? I often think other people's jobs as less demanding but i don't think that would be the case.

I just want to be in touch with people, the people that i know, the people i can trust somewhat.

When i was in 7th std, life was so easy. There was this just 1 irritating thing called school that we had to attend.
After that, we used to run down to nearest park in our shorts and cricketbats or rsckets, play till our heart's content, then sit in some friends house for hours and talk shit , then come back home , do some irritating study, then go back to watching television and playing online games with those same friends , while deciding the birthday party of some guy and game plans for the next day.

Damn

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

I just hate it when people dont know tools of their profession!
You are a dev..... Learn git goddamnit!
You are a frontend dev.... Know SASS and various other tools that will make your and people around you's life easier.
You are a backend dev.... Know how to use linux and know which tool to use to make the app faster.....
Or else dont talk to me and leave me alone.

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

Question to all JS Frontend Devs: What light and performant library can you recommend me today?
I'm a C++ dev who is a bit anxious about performance, load times etc. and before I stuck my nose into vanilla js, maybe there is something better/faster. I'm a total frontend noob, e.g. I heard that html tables aren't a thing anymore and that I should use divs?
My task is quite simple, I want to give the users the ability to press some buttons and drag and drop stuff around instead of modifying the URL per hand :/
So if someone could point me in the right direction, that would be awesome!

!dev

I wanted to take small loan from bank I am loyal customer for 15 years to speed up things by month. I decided to pay money for it.
They have some online form for it and I filled it.

So what happened next ?
I got call to confirm every input I filled (heard keyboard typing every time I answered question).
I asked how long I will wait and got response that it will take couple of hours, max 2 days.

Just received another call 10 days later that they need documents to prove my income.

They got 15 years history of every operation and it looks like it means nothing.

I said to person I will earn this money faster then I get it from them so at this point this conversation is just waste of my time.

It’s 10 days left till end of month and I think it will be easier to just wait or ask friend for a favor.

Yet another reason to say fuck banks.
Time is money.

!rant

Ever find something that's just faster than something else, but when you try to break it down and analyze it, you can't find out why?

PyPy.
I decided I'd test it with a typical discord bot-style workload (decoding a JSON theoretically from an API, checking if it contains stuff, format and then returning it). It was... 1.73x the speed of python.

(Though, granted, this code is more network dependent than anything else.)

Mean +- std dev: [kitsu-python] 62.4 us +- 2.7 us -> [kitsu-pypy] 36.1 us +- 9.2 us: 1.73x faster (-42%)

Me: Whoa, how?!
So, I proceed to write microbenches for every step. Except the JSON decoding, (1.7x faster was at least twice as slow (in one case, one hundred times slower) when tested individually.
The combination of them was faster. Huh.

By this point, I was all "sign me up!", but... asyncpg (the only sane PostgreSQL driver for python IMO, using prepared statements by default and such) has some of it's functionality written in C, for performance reasons. Not Cython, actual C that links to CPython. That means no PyPy support.

Okay then.

Delays. Delays in payment, delays in scope and spec delivery, delays from the graphics guys, delays from the X guy, the Y guy, this company, that company. No matter what the reason, delays leave that leave the Dev waiting and sitting around despondent and losing interest faster than the second to latest viral video.

I wrote the most jQuery I have in months today! I'm so happy I bailed at my old job, be side there they would have just given this task to an older dev who could do it faster and not have to ask questions. I only asked the internet and I got it on about 3 hours!

What's your opinion on functional shortcuts and 'hacks' in many languages, like map/reduce/filter, ternary operator, lambdas,inner/anonymous classes?

Imo they can make development faster and more efficent but they make the code very unreadable, especially if someone else has to read it, Therefore I try to use them only when it's appropriate. My dev friends use them too much and it makes reading their code a hellish experience, especially in Javascript with Rx.

I am a web-dev wannabe marketing person. I was locked up in mental ward twice because I often get paranoid way too much about security issues that might never happened to me. Last time I even refused to use hexcode because I believed that my computer is being used for someone's crypto mining. I am still scared of node.js,CDN and googlefont or TIFF, pdf files, and many other things that I don't understand perfectly.

It's always breathtaking, cliffhanging, and thrilling session when I'm working on something with my computer. My heartbeat gets faster, my palms gets sweaty when I start to type <script>. It's like when you watch horror movie, or wearing seatbelt on roller coaster before the session begins. You are frightened but excited at the same time. 🤤

I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐

It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.

Not even a discussion? On the fit?

That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!

I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.

Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:

”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”

What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?

Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.

I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.

And then there are the consultants…

*sigh*

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

I think the following is all in my head, or I am heading towards an office rivalry situation between my tech lead and me.

characters :
me : a no nonsense android guy who is sometimes very blunt when requested for unwarranted demands. i am also realising that i have been a bit too arrogant, as i come up with a lot of counter questions too fast (not related to story tho)

tech lead : an android guy who has been android dev for a total of 4 years (same as me), 3 of them in current company and somehow got promoted to TL

story: I find this guy to be too much political, delegating a lazy bum, and i kinda called him out in public , once during a discussion where other folks were also kinda calling him out and another time when we were having a small meeting of 3 people. he in turn has taken some actions (like giving me a lower kpi, not giving me appropriate data for doing some work and then asking about it in public, casually ignoring my leave requests) which looks he is taking out a revenge.

at first time i called him out in a discussion where everyone was getting against his havit of giving buttery responses to his boss (who occasionally joins our standups) . he says "we are on track" while we are already dependent on him to provide data/decisions.
he then says to us to do it faster , and when the work does not get completed ( because how it could be, without him doing his job), he blames it on devs.

i called him out on a similar but different topic of him making last moment task additions when we are already on brim with our planned tasks.

on second time i called him out on him not looking into the current task enough as he was expecting me to take decisions on my own.
the decision was about how a screens ui will be populated and there was no api payload available that would match the ui . i created 2 mock api jsons which would appropriately load that screen but was not sure if the 2 apis would be enough for the screen and wondered whete some missing data will come from?
this task is a long one, nd i did took a decision, but he should had validated them to make sure we are on track. the issue came when i took some questions to him and instead of answering them , he blamed on me not being mature enough to work without the data!

All things aside, I am on my weary ends with thins guy. He is my boss and holds incredible powers over me, but he is incredibly incompetent and his habits of delay, delegation and blaming is making my work life worse. I don't wanna leave this job too, because as much as i hate it, its currently one of the major names in industries and giving a solid power to my resume

I’m currently working 2 jobs with over 60 hour work weeks in addition to my own SaaS company.

One job is full-time 40 hours, where I am a mid level developer and I just do the waterfall of tickets that is assigned to me. This place is unorganized and has almost no communication within the team.

The second job I am the Senior Dev and project lead. It’s a contract position that I put 20+ hours in on the evenings and weekends. Agile methodology, with a modern tech stack and I promote excellent communication as well as documenting everything.

I’m in a unique position because I’m able to see these differences and compare them side by side. My full-time job doesn’t really know about the second job. I get my work done, and that’s all that matters. This place is a mess. The project lead (CTO) is a helicopter boss that sticks his nose up at any type of formal documentation and practices. No tests are written.. no SIPs or deployment docs.. no stand ups or anything. I must also mention this team has 5 developers and a QA.. my team is only 2 developers and a QA. We get through tickets much faster.. it helps when I go over every single ticket that is created and add requirements and images..

I guess my point is... I’m about to be a full-time contractor because I can’t take this unprofessionalism anymore.

Just because these formalities technical take longer. It does decrease actual time spent developing a project. Spending a couple of hours on tests and requirements can save you days of back and forth in the future. Not to mention... document.. everything.

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

I hate when programmers never want to go out their comfort zone. They should be relegated into a hell spinned inside a Virtualbox instance.

I have this *** angular setup. We want to try to keep the dev environment congruent between all the colleagues.

The decent programmer would use a node version manager, or try to keep up with everything. LOLNOPE THEY FUCKIN' SPUN A FRIGGIN' VAGRANT VIRTUAL MACHINE RUNNED WITH ADMIN PERMISSIONS which is slowing everyone down. A single "npm i" now requires half an hour.

I tried to use YARN that is faster and makes a mergeable lock, NOPE WE SHOULD KEEP USING THAT STUPID NPM INSTALL that is slow AF and sometimes messes up the versions.

I tried to make 'em use the peerDependencies correctly but LOLNOPE WE SHOULD RELY ONTO THE AUTOMATIC PEERDEP RESOLVER INSIDE NPM7, SO YOU DON'T KNOW IF YOUR VERY SAME LIBRARY IS INCLUDED OR NOT.

Thank god i'm changing job.

I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.

But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.

An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.

An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.

What would you do as a senior developer?

- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit

Is exclusively being assigned bug tickets only for a whole sprint (they're not my bugs) while another dev does feature work a bad sign? I'm a Senior SDE but my domain Knowledge is far weaker than the other SDE 2, so he can get feature work done faster. Bug fixes are general project ones that are either suddenly very critical or lower priority and leads me to keep debugging some other aspect of the system (not much documentation sadly so have to check whole flow slowly to understand it, very financial based).

My manager also just yesterday said as a senior my expectation is to lead a project and we'll discuss the requirements of my role. This is my direct manager, the one who assigned me all the bugs is the project manager, who also acts a bit like an SDE sometimes. The problem is I want to deliver work my main manager suggests but I simply don't get the time due to suddenly high priority bugs occurring (last night 1 hour before I log off, other manager says to find root cause analysis of a high priority bug), this isn't an oncall rota or task either, just normal bugs all the time.

Is this a bad sign? Am I about to be PiPed?

Wk56 my favorite dev tool is resharper cuz it make writing c# code easier and faster .

So I was working on a web scraper to basically download all listings with detailed info from a e-shop to my database for some analysis.
And I completely forgot throttling which is quite important when writing such things in node.js.
It's funny how in other languages you try to figure out how to make your application faster and in node you're trying to make it slower 😄

Anyhow, I apparently hit the poor site with 5000+ simultaneous requests, all of which hit their database (to gather product info). Suffice to say, the site got visibly slow 🤣

Thankfully I print out where each request is made so I quickly realised my mistake and killed the process.

Now I hope no-one comes knocking on my door lol

The adventures of being a node.js dev

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:

1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.

2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.

3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.

4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.

5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.

6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.

7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.

8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.

9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.

10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.

My 10 cents.

This is the first time I have a bad PM and it's much worse than having a pain in the ass colleague dev. A bad dev will mess his/work project and maybe slow down 1-2 other devs.
But a bad PM will doom the whole project, wasting lots of time of the devs working under him/her. Costing much more company's money.

PM:This task should be ready by next week.
Me : This task will require X weeks time for developing and delivery
PM: What?! That's too long, it's a simple one, should be done in a few days.
Me: **explaining the challenges, limitation, env set up, testing etc. Also because I am a junior so may take more time than experienced dev**
PM: **insist that this is important blah blah**
Me: Understand your points but X days is just too little, I don't want you to blame me for missing the deadline. Either we get a reasonable deadline or you can get more experienced dev to do it faster.
**Knowing well that I have the most experience in this task and other devs are busy with their own tasks**

In the end I have to escalate this argument to more senior manager because both of us won't budge. Not only she agreed to extend the deadline she also assigned a senior dev to help me when I am stuck.

His other mistakes I noticed during my time working under him:
- not consulting senior dev for the approach to the task (thus we have to change the design twice).
- assigning tasks to people without sufficient background (a java dev is being assigned a python task, it's doable but it's going to be faster if we assign to someone with more python experience right?)
I understand that our company is short-staffed, but I begin to wonder if the stress the devs endure is because of that or because of his incompetence.

Next time, I am going to specifically ask not to work under him again.

Do you feel that mobile development destroys your phone battery? At least when developing React-Native, I use a cable most of the time and thus, the phone gets charged.

After some time it feels like the battery is draining faster. I experienced this with the second phone already.

Makes most sense if you have a separate dev phone, I guess...

Anybody like to rip up CTF (or similar)? I've honestly never done a CTF before, I'd like to give jt a shot. I'll get my ass handed to me because I'm not back up to par on OpSec yet, but I adapt well and when I get into a nice groove I can make shit happen! (I like to think so, anyways haha!!)
I've been in full on dev mode lately and haven't had any time to Hulk Smash for a while... I went to fire up a new Kali live USB today and I couldn't run through the updates like I always have- they changed sooo much and I was pissed because I didn't have ethernet with me. That'll be another day for sure, but I still have my machine with Manjaro armed to the nutsack and back with the BlackArch rep. I def could use a break from the chaos, and getting my ass handed right to me sounds like an awesome time because learning is my favorite thing next to a possible chance at getting to destroy shit.
It's weird, because I'm sort of a n00b but also at the same time I've had computers ripped apart/jammed in my face since every day since I was 9 and Y2K was about to hit the fan lmao!! My hardware/network/layering knowledge is fuckin mint titties, I just can't code like a fuckin madman on the fly. I don't have a "primary" language, because I've been having to work with little bits of several languages for extended periods of time... I can at least find my way around all the dox without much of an issue and have no issue solving the probs I come across which is neat, but until the day comes where I can fuck a gaping hole through my keyboard on the fly like George Hotz during one of his lazy Sunday OpenCV SLAM/Python code streams all jacked up on Herba Mate hahahahaha!!!!
The dude uses fucking VIM and codes faster than anyone I've ever seen on levels of science/math so challenging I almost shit myself inside out when I catch one!!!! The level of respect I have for all my fellow red pills in here is as high as it gets, and that's one of the best parts about being a code junkie- sometimes ya get to cross paths with beastly, out of this world people that teach you so much without even having to explain shit.
If anyone's down, or maybe has some resources for me to check out so I can get my chops up let's make it happen

People, help me out.

(first some abstract thoughts)

I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.

As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.

My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied

------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)

I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.

for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.

1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )

2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website

BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?

2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2

2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.

Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.

But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.

What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?

Hi devRant. Wanna rant with some shit about my company. First some good parts. I work in company with 600+ employees. It's one of the best companies in my region. They provide you with any kind of sweets(cookies, coffee, tea, etc), any hardware you need for your work (additional monitor, more ram, SSDs, processor, graphics card, whatever), just about everything you need to make your work faster/comfortable. Then, we have regular reviews (every 6 months), which rise salary from $0.75 to $1.5 per hour. (I live in poor country, where $15 per hour makes your more solvent then 70% of people, so having 100-200 bucks increase every half year is quite good rise).
The resulting increase of review depends on how team leader and project manager are satisfied with my work. And here starts the interesting (e.g. the shit comes in).
1) Seniority level in our company applies depending on the salary you have. That't right. It does not depend on your skill. Except the case when you're applying to vacancy. So if you tell that you're senior dev and prove it during interview, you'll have senior's salary. This is fine if you're just want money. But not if you love programming (as me) because of reasons bellow.
2) You don't need to have lots of programming experience to be a team leader. You can even be a junior team leader (but thanks god, on research projects only). You start from leading research projects and than move to billable if the director of research department is satisfied with your leading skills.
As a consequence our seniors are dumb AF. This pieces me off the most. Not all of them. A would say half of them are real pro guys, but the rest suck at programming (as for a senior). They are around junior/middle level.
I can understand if guy has $15 rate but still remains junior dev. That's fine. But hell no, he is treated as a middle, because his rate is $10+ now! And his mind has priority over middles and juniors. Not that junior have lof of good tougths but sometimes they do.
I'm lucky to work yet on small project so I'm the only dev, and so to speak TL for myself. But my colleague has this kind of senior team leader who is dumb AF. They work on ASP.NET Core project, the senior does not even know how to properly write generic constraints in C#. Seriously.
Just look at this shit. Instead of

MyClass<T> where T: class {}

he does this:

abstract class EnsureClass {}
MyClass<T> where T: EnsureClass {}

He writes empty abstract class, forces other classes to inherit it (thus, wasting the ability to inherit some useful class) just to ensure that generic T is a class. What thA FUCK is wrong with you dude?! You're a senior dev and you don't even know the language you're codding in.
And this shit is all over the company. Every monkey that had enough skill just to not be fired and enough patience to work 4-5 years becomes a senior! No-fucking-body cares and reviews your skill increase. The whole review is about department director asking TL and PM question like "how is this guy doing? is he OK or we should fire him?" That's the whole review. If TL does not like you, he can leave bad review and the company will set you on trial. If you confront TL during this period, pack your suitcase. Two cases of such shit I know personally. A good skilled guy could not just find common language with his TL and got fired. And the cherry on top of the case is that thay don't care about the fired dev's mind. They will only listen to reviewer. This is just absurd and just boils me down.
That's all i wanted to say. Thanks for your attention.

Tried to explain to the department lead that having devs spend more time documenting what we spend time on, asking for permissions to do anything doesn't make the project go faster.

Leads might feel good about having better overview for themselves, but in reality you just slowed down, demotivated and annoy the entire team of people doing the actual work. Noone wants to or will do overtime because we have to ask for permission first. And you took away one good dev to spend his entire days in meetings instead of actually doing any real work on the project.

#releasethedevs

Why is it that Browsersync works so much faster and cleaner in Chrome then Firefox. I want to dev in Firefox but Chrome is seriously tempting me with it's faster refresh rate with HTML and JS.

Google I want to hate you and dammit sometimes I just can't. 😫

I feel like a slave being whipped when my company says: "Develop faster, faster, fasterrrrrrrrr!".

Sigh.

OpenSource is fun they said. I being a bored teen thought, ah, another chance to experiment. Discover something new. Now I am into piracy, movies, music, software. If I can get it for free I ain't paying for it. So I went on to GitHub to see what exciting new Repos I could contribute to. I hate already implemented plenty of algorithms in GO for GitHub.com/TheAlgorithms so I was looking something more practical, more beneficial to society. Then I saw it, the perfect repo, not too complex and not amateur. SpotDL/spotify-downloader for downloading songs from Spotify, a grey area coz it's technically piracy. Well not from Spotify, we fetch the info from the Spotify API and search for the songs on YouTubeMusic. They were just about to release v3, a complete rewrite of the codebase stressing code readability and stuff. I spend about a day studying the codebase, trying to findout just where I could make my contribution. I can see outright that there's a huge problem with implementation.

First of all the script spawns 4 processes for downloading songs though you might be downloading only one song. Which means for everytime you run the script you have to wait for 4 other processes to be spawned before any downloading can happen. Sure this is faster when you are downloading more than like 4 songs, but it's actually slower when downloading a single song. But I ignored that coz I assumed that most users download playlists and albums. Anyway we talked with the like lead developer and he was all like, make those PRs anytime you feel like. So I made a really minor first contribution.

I introduced download from Spotify URI functionality, modified like 10 lines of code. I was half expecting that the PR would be merged within hours at most 24 hours coz of how minor of a contribution it was, 5 days in it was pending. So I tagged the lead Dev and he was all appreciative of the PR, calling it real 'clean code' and stuff. 3 more days, the PR is still not merged. I have now stacked 4 more commits to the same PR, I tag the dev and he's like he's waiting to see if my 'feature' will get atleast 10 upvotes so that it can be merged, he links an issue. I go to the issue and my feature is not there, So 11 days after I made my PR I have to write a comment explaining the 'feature' introduced in my PR and then wait for 10 upvotes.

I was like f**k this, I'll just develop on my fork if you want the features on my fork, you will make your own PR! I am so done with OpenSource, development is slow. I have no idea how you guys do it. I can't handle development where I don't have write access.

Been developing a website for a few months for a group of people who started a company in their spare time. Basically, everyone puts in about 5 hours a week. The two founders spent a year planning the site, creating mockups and collecting data. Site has user login, 5 main sections that all require custom programming to do what they need it to do.

After a month, the one dude is getting pissy with me because I can't get their site up any faster. I agreed to 5 hours a week, in my spare time for equity to a project that has no clear monetization plan. Sometimes my main job and paying clients eat even that time up.

To date, I've only got about 30 hours of actual dev time, and 15 hours of meetings. The first launch is in sight, but the site is a monster and has more phases to come.

I tried Appgyver over christmas, since it promised easy front-end (no-)coding I was looking forward to getting rudimentary frontends done faster.
Well, the first real project that I wanted to start didn't compile anymore (internal error from the service), the page told me to reload and try again.
It failed again... And again.
Fine with me, I only spent 10 minutes on the project at this point.

I then searched for the bugreporting page and found it. The sad thing is that when I wanted to open a ticket the server crashed. It didn't even return a HTTP error, just a JSON saying there is a error and a GUID.

I have to say, if a Dev decided to have holidays without new issues that's one way of getting that done.

It's been over 7 months of being deployed to help finish a project that's crossed the deadline umpteenth times. There's only this guy who had started on this project and me as developers. He's a nice guy, but I'm finding him to be a snowflake that's extremely difficult to work with. Every time I mention a critical problem with his original design, or the approaches he takes on this project, he takes it personally. He would pour out a long spiel of why this and why that, and waste most of the meeting time. Or he would run to his outdated diagrams or documents that he had created himself somewhere deep in the wiki forest, and use that as a defense. He creates his own user stories and tasks on a whim with no PM supervision. I've noted to the managers that this is a project to fail, and all they've done is assign a busy PM to this project, and the new PM is perfectly fine w/ the way the project has been handled so far.
I point out a small flaw with his assumptions just the other day, and he even managed to hyperventilate and again fall back to his outdated document... WTF? I'd rather start from scratch and get this project finished faster.. and even though I've expressed my objection to continue on this path, the managers foolishly believe that this project will be completed somehow. I don't hate my development partner, or PM, or people in the management, but I hate the fact that I don't have control over so many aspects of this project, including the half-assed, unnecessarily complex design, and the dev workflow itself. I feel like I'm tied to a car that's being thrown over the cliff, and assigned to fix the junky car w/ its engine broken before the car hits the ground. Something like this would never be allowed to go in a commercial sector. I just wish that the management could just give me control over project as THE lead & PM over this project, and get this project tied up for good, and with better reusability and quality.

Has anyone noticed that lately Safari renders websites faster?

I have been testing the cache on one of our sites. Been testing with Safari, Chrome, Firefox(Clean no addons) and FirefoxDeveloperEdition. The response time from the server is pretty much identical on all the browsers. But Safari is definitely quicker at rendering it out.

Anyone got a clue why? The only thing i suspect is that safari doesnt have dev tools enabled, so that might be the culprit?