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#2 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.
var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"
In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";
His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."
Mgmt bought it.
This process took him a few months to complete.
When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)
T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."
Mgmt bought it again.
Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.
By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).
In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."
DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).7 -
Up for a rollercoaster?
I had a super motivated day where i could focus and wanted to get my work done. My stupid work lappy instead kept throwing tantrums and totally prevented me from working. (Everything caused disk thrashing, took multiple minutes instead of seconds, etc.) Total shit day, but I felt great.
Next morning, I woke up all achy and cold. Ignored it and went to work. I was able to fix everything, and got my benchmarks running smoothly in all of fifteen minutes. Got good results, too! Left work and got married at the courthouse. :)
Went to a restaurant afterward, and two jolly fat guys (Off-duty Santa?!) bought us lunch.
Got home and… started feeling really awful. A little while later, I had a 102*f fever. Collapsed on the floor with an electric blanket and was absolutely miserable. Just kind of stared for hours, aching everywhere. Eventually went to bed, and my wife (!) made me all warm and comfy. And then I proceeded to be completely unable to sleep. Or move. Or think. Laid there for four hours unable to move, and shaking violently at any touch of cold air.
Now it’s 1am and I’m here at the freezing kitchen table writing this.
I am miserable.
Absolutely miserable.
But still happy, too!
🥶👰♀️💍👰🏻♀️19 -
Action takes place during demo to the stakeholders.
Manager : During the demo we will show a working prototype of new functionality. In this sprint we focused on that feature not on UX. Please do not pay attention to UI and focus on business values
*Dev starts sharing screen*
*1 sec after*
Executive : This is unacceptable. It looks gross, why you don't use default controls.
Manager : We did, this is how they look like, but please do not pay attention to UI, it is not finished
*Dev continue presenting*
*1 sec after*
Executive : I see missing comma in that sentence. It is unacceptable to show features in that state, lets move on to another team.
It was really large feature working as a charm, but they focused entirely on unpolished UI :/4 -
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.10 -
I was pressued to shift the blame.
We received an angry email from a customer that some of their data had disappeared. The boss assigns me to this task. This feature is relatively new and we've found some bugs in the past in here. I go through request logs, search the database, run some diagnostics, etc. for about 5 hours and I cannot find the problem. I focus on the bugs that we've had before but they don't seem to be the problem.
I tell the boss "sorry but I checked XYZ and I can't find the problem. I'm out of ideas." But the boss wanted answers by the end of the day. They did not want to admit to the client that we couldn't figure out what's wrong.
By now I was more pressured to find an answer, find something or someone to blame it on, not exactly to find the real solution. So I made up some BS:
"Sometimes, in HTML forms, the number inputs allow you to change the number by scrolling. We have some long forms where the user has to scroll. Perhaps the focus remained on the number input, so when they scrolled down they accidentally changed the number they meant to input."
The boss was happy with that. We explained this to the customer, and there's now a ticket to change type="number" to type="text" in our HTML forms and to validate it in th backend.
A week later another customer shows us a different error. This one is more clear because it had a stack trace, but I realise that this error is what caused our last error. It was pretty obscure, mind you, the unit tests didn't detect it.
I didn't tell the boss that they were connected tho.
With two angry clients in two weeks, I finally convinced the boss to give us more time to write more unit tests with full coverage. -
Been programming for 3 years now, self-taught but decided couldn't find any job and decided to enroll in college. The teachers are the worst, if I listen to them word for word I get confused about concepts I already know, they're classes are really slow and the teacher focus on a handful of student who slow down the whole class and I'm afraid by the end of the semester they will be rushing.7
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Had a recruiter say I was saying "wasting his time" by constantly declining job opportunities he sent via email (it was a mass email too). Another recruiter started questioning why I didn't work for this other company that didn't seem to have technology as a decent focus at its core. I'm honestly done with recruiters.3
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I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.
Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.
For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.
I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.
They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.
Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.
They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.
They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.
Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.
Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.
Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.
Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.
Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.4 -
my covid is still not recovered. Today marks the two weeks. I got fever the first day and then fever was gone but body pain and weakness was there. In 2 days, body pain was gone too. Now I couldn't only eat well. So tried light food but after sometime it was harder to eat properly.
Now I'm having the same diet I used to have before covid, but I'm still not feeling well. I feel pain in my shoulders. My heart races almost all the time and that gives restlessness to my days and it's very hard to focus because of that. Family issues, work, excitement of switching companies, even small bit of sound makes me more restless. If someone has the same symptoms when did they last?38 -
i think it's a waste of time and resources to memorize syntax and other stuff you can google. since we have a lot of material available, we should focus on logic, more abstract concepts, stuff you can't copy paste. well, I think that should be the way in every area, not only CS15
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The meeting attendee added that Zuckerberg appeared red-eyed and told staff he might tear up during the meeting, not because of the topics being discussed but because he'd "scratched his eye," Bloomberg reported.
Isn't this soul satisfying?
Iceberg losing billions in few hours and pressurising 'FAANG' bootlickers who joined Meta to narrow down on video saying he did not expect TikTok as a competition.
LMAO. Fucking hilarious.
Map the normalisation curve for anything and it's always symmetrical. Facebook's downfall has started.
Source: https://businessinsider.com/mark-zu...
10 -
Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.
I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).
Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:
1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios
While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.
On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..
One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.
One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.
Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?14 -
I am now so nervous waiting for the first day of my new role. It is projected to start on May 16th. In the meanwhile I’ve finished my Background Check, Tax Documents, and other onboarding information. There’s supposed to be a drug test but I haven’t received info on it yet. I have two weeks where I might receive a few memos and hopefully my company laptop but will be largely just waiting. I’m going to try and focus on learning Puppet while I wait but this is like waiting for Christmas as a kid. Even though it’s a very short amount of time it feels like years.5
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i have been applying for jobs recently, and after getting some HR interviews that evolved to tech interviews, i just cancelled them all...
Every company seems to have hacker rank, and online coding sessions as tech interview stages which really stress me out. Its like everyone thinks they are google and its ok to make people go theough this pressure to join them.
I dont mind being given 10 days to implement a complex project, after which im either in or not. But 20 mins to solve something online while either the interviewer is watching me or the automated test is waiting to filter my application out... i get anxiety just thinking about that..
so im gonna stick with my current job for now, and focus on building my own business slowly on the side. I really felt anxious because of those tech interviews these past weeks and i feel so much better after cancelling all of them.
if a decent company comes along with the project approach, id love to apply, but otherwise ill just stick to where I am for now. dont know if im being immature or irresponsible career wise or if this decision will blow up in my face
stay tune to find out !15 -
Not really trying to, but probably should try to fix this bad, bad habit…
I keep wanting to fix and improve everything - and I keep taking notes, writing action plans et fucking cetera to the point the amount of work that should be done and I want to do is driving me insane. And they should all get done now!
In short, I should really either learn to focus on just one thing at a time for a meaningful period - or just cease to give a fuck. Either could work.3 -
If someone who wants Linux to be the future of gaming was able to control the thoughts and actions of the decision makers at Microsoft, Windows 11 is exactly what they would make them release. I can think of no better way to prompt game developers to move their focus away from Windows.7
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The popups on websites pisses me off.
If you try to google something quickly and enter various websites you have to close all popups on each site you enter.
Some websites try to make these popups more discreet by making them small and putting them at the bottom of the screen but then your brain just ignore them and focus on the small content above them.
In the year of 2022 people visit a lot of sites during a day. The human brain is programmed to put in as little work as possible to reach a certain goal so therefor everyone ignores popups.
I know its a law to inform people about cookies etc. But isnt there a better way?15 -
Do you have a routine? I work from home everyday since quarantine and I don't think we are going back to the office.
I would like to be more productive, not in the sense of forcing myself to do more job and add more stress, no one is complaining about the time it takes me to finish tasks.
I'm looking for a way to scatter my working hours so I have chunks of focus and chunks of breaks in which I go out for a walk or something instead of a big chunk of focus mixed with distraction. I'm behaving as if it were a "9-5 job" when it is actually "8 hours per day" with flexible schedule.8 -
Yesterday, I was looking back at a project that isn't a focus right now, and unintentionally realised the cause of a frustrating bug. It's a one line fix and the smallest PR I've ever done, and it was such a good feeling!2
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There has to be a software project bingo somewhere where I could just mark one item at a time of what's wrong and should be fixed, eventually leading to the same loop all over again. Items include, but are not limited to:
- The application is too tightly coupled
- There are too many repos and people can't keep track
- Someone forgot to create a naming convention for everything
- Nobody is reviewing pull requests
- Someone opened a PR for their 1 month of work
- Some team created a service for themselves, that doesn't cover use cases for every other team (who didn't tell anyone they needed it), thus it was a bad thing
- Business owners telling something needs to get done now and go talk directly to a developer
- Nobody thought about network latency in microservice architecture
- There's an invalid translation in this string, let's push the MVP another two months to make sure everything is perfect before launch
- The API gateway has business logic in it
- Business wants to focus on output, development teams in outcome
- "You need to request a virtual machines from the IT department so we know you won't mine bitcoin there!" Takes two months to fulfill that request.
- <add documentation here>
- 675 vulnerabilities in packages
- People complain about not knowing what others are doing, but nobody wants to speak up1 -
1. Keep my job
2. Keep my side job
3. Revive blogging at least 1 post a month
4. Keep focus on what’s important and what are priorities
5. Finish my notes / diary application cause my text files / html pages are now taking up to much space and using cat/grep to search trough them is painful ( it can also help with point 3 )
6. Maybe just maybe start writing prototype of table top rpg game scenario, I have a concept in my mind for a long time but it’s also connected to point 5 and 7 and 8
7. Spend twice more time to practice drawing than in this year
8. Read / listen to more than 1 book a month
I think that’s it from dev stuff1 -
Do you prefer working remote or in the office?
I like to view these as equal choices. I don't think offices are as bad as some people make them up to be (of course heavily depends on the environment and company!). In opposed to working remote, offices can help you focus more on work and leave work problems "at work".
While, if you're working remote, it's not unlikely for work and personal life to become so intertwined that it's hard to tell them apart anymore. It's hard to not think about work at home if home is where you work.
I believe an ideal is somewhere inbetween - not entirely remote, but not entirely office focused either. Mixing and matching seems like the one approach where you get to have most of the benefits, but with the least negatives. It doesn't seem necessary to always be at the office but it also doesn't seem good for you to always be cooped up at home.7 -
I feel like some developers focus too much on concepts like clean code, software craftsmanship, TDD and so forth, to a point where they almost forget end user needs (ease of use, intuitive experiences, general UX principles).
Don’t get me wrong. I do my best to stick to a decent standard of quality and maintainability. However my solutions are adapted to the specific needs that are being addressed rather than the other way around.
I’ve heard some devs say things to the effect of ”well I know that’s not most intuitive behavior for the user but it’s the cleaner way to do it, so the user will just have to figure it out“. So in essence they’re just coding for their own pleasure rather than addressing user needs4 -
WORDPRESSS DEVELOPERS:
What’s your #1 tip for getting started in this role? Useful training site or video? What’s best to focus on first? Hooks? I need all the juicy deets! 🙌🏻9 -
does my co-worker code is actually really necessary, for the sake of arguments lets ignore server performance, and focus on this snippet.
added comment on the side of the parameters
12 -
Best:
Seeing ALL the members of my team finally coming into their own. One person tackled our entire not-at-all-simple CI/CD setup from scratch knowing nothing about any of it and, while not without bumps in the road, did an excellent job overall (and then did the same for some other projects since he found himself being the SME). Two of my more junior people took on some difficult tasks that required them to design and build some tricky features from the ground-up, rather than me giving them a ton of guidance, design and even a start on the basic code early on (I just gave them some general descriptions of what I was looking for and then let them run with it). Again, not without some hiccups, but they ultimately delivered and learned a lot in the process and, I think, gained a new sense of self-confidence, which to me is the real win. And my other person handled some tricky high-level stuff that got him deep in the weeds of all the corporate procedures I'd normally shield them all from and did very well with it (and like the other person, wound up being an SME and doing it for some other projects after that). It took a while to get here, but I finally feel like I don't need to do all the really difficult stuff myself, I can count on them now, and they, I think, no longer feel like they're in over their heads if I throw something difficult at them.
Worst:
A few critical bugs slipped into production this year, with a few requiring some after-hours heroics to deal with (and, unfortunately, due to the timing, it all fell on me). Of course, that just tells us that next year we really need to focus on more robust automated testing (though, in reality, at least one of the issues almost certainly would not - COULD NOT - have been caught before-hand anyway, and that's probably true for more than just one of them). We had avoided major issues the previous three years we've been live, so this was unusual. Then again, it's in a way a symptom of success because with more users and more usage, both of which exploded this year, typically does come more issues discovered, so I guess it tempers the bad just a little bit.2 -
Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.1 -
Question for devs who use Intellij IDEA.
How often do you use livetemplates?
I am a new android dev with ADHD and just discovered live templates. They make my life much easier, for example I have shortcuts for generating recyclerview adapter/viewholder/implementation boilerplate code.
In that way I am able to focus on implementation, and do my coding like building blocks, rather than memorizing every detail of implementation. Also I don't need to go to stackoverflow and copypaste basic things multiple times. Even for example during live coding interview having livetemplates seems awesome, copypasting from stackoverflow would be shameful (I think). Using my own custom shortcuts for livetemplates seems the best way for how my brain functions (I suck at memorizing tiny details, but I remember general idea/flow of a pattern and I would prefer memorizing what to use and when to use, instead of all small details of implementation).
Is getting to dependent on livetemplates a good practice to get used to? Do other developers frown upon a dev who has dozens of livetemplates and relies on them instead of writing all code from memory by hand?8 -
I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
Isn’t it delightful when you come in to a large project to discover that they have a large underlying core that no one wants to touch but everyone relies on.
Quickly perusing the code you realize that the base was clearly created by someone who found their first tutorials for Java, but were previously a c developer.
It’s funny cause this code is of course from ~20 years ago and in different sections you can tell they were a C developer, a business admin, a Db admin, a junior conforming to pressures from others.
I recently looked at the deep rooted abuses of Java beans, and this entire internally created state management engine that serves no purpose but to create contrived complexity.
The use of propriety tools, that they paid lots for that perform incredibly simple tasks that have long since been solved by the open source community. Many of which are long defunct.
And the constant focus is on monkey patching the engine to solve small issues, which bloat the time to deal with issues. Since everything needs to be tested by their methodologies.
The inability to understand that the underlying structure is the issue and that tackling that, rather than just shifting the entire solution to new languages will suddenly solve the problems(or other underlying systems).
It’s just sad.1 -
Why the fuck isnt pythons tabbed loop thing something that's configurable?
So many things to like about python, but is there someone on this planet who actually likes this feature?
Trying to use it in Jupyter notebook (browser) is a nightmare, because tab will focus on next ui element.
Or am i missing something?13 -
I'm currently working as an intern in a Web company and its the first time that I have to work 8 hours a day (I'm in college so that's completely new to me).
How do you guys stay focused for 8 hours? It's kinda hard to go from 90 minutes classes to 8 hours of (somewhat) consistent work.
How do I focus for a long period of time?8 -
stop thinking big and trying to fix, predict and solve every problem and accept the fact that I lost the battle so I can focus on small things instead of big ideas that would never happen
cause maybe just maybe bunch of small things can at some point shape big idea -
Question for my fellow devs:
Do you feel like you are spending too much time on maintaining ur devops/infrastructure rather than focusing on the actual product?
Do you think your company would be willing to spend a bit of money to outsource scaling problems to someone else and just focus on the product?
Ik we got lots of fancy new CI platforms like Circle CI GH actions etc but like I personally feel like I’m doing certain infrastructure tasks twice when I look at the two different codebases I work on.8 -
Theory should be minimal courses, just something to think about and not something that expands through the entire curriculum as if anyone was to use it. Theory and fundamentals are enough, after that have career paths over what students want to focus on depending on a class that takes them through each different field: web development, db development, micro controller programming, os programming networking programming etc etc etc.
Basically, not :hey! here are some shitty basic programming classes, ok now let us move into calculus 1, 2, 3 etc etc. Most people come out of schools with no knowledge of what happens in the real world.3 -
so, another trip coming around for this hopelessly single, awkward guy . this time it's a solo trip to the office in a different state , where i will be working with my teammates for a week, and meeting them in person for the first time.
pros : am one of the good guys as my tl is often mentioning it in retrospect calls about how my all tasks are completed and there's no spill over. my seniors are also recently asking me to explain stuff and give KTs
cons :
- am nothing beyond my work domain. Being a techy nerd is sometimes a good intro and convo starters among non tech group, there it's going to be all tech people.
- am the youngest guy in the team. Some of them being married, most of them being drinkers and smokers and a few of them being alpha extrovert people leaves little room for small, overconcious introvert , guys like me.
- like every trip, my hopelessly loveless brain is excited about the "girls" being there and hoping for some connection/more
So any tips for me to shine out and connect with someone? or should i put a leash on my drooling mouth and focus on work? i guess office relationships are a dangerous category, from what i have heard4 -
This got me wondering...
Was shown a product today, doesn't matter what it was, because that part is irrelevant for question. Just out of unsubstantiated curiosity, I'm curious to hear other opinions .
How do you judge a product during first impressions period? Doesn't matter if it's a piece of software, gadget, food product, or all of the aforementioned at the same time.
As I just said - I was shown a product today, well, okay ... not in-person, and not actually shown, rather, made aware of a product. And after looking at it, I realized, that I can no longer look at a product and not focus on "red flags" or look for "where's the catch?". This product, that I'll just keep referring to as "the product" for the sake of keeping it neutral, was unfamiliar to me - I know nothing of it's manufacturer, so any trust to the brand is non-existant, the product brief on the website only made me question every marketing bulletpoint claim they had listed, aņd it didn't make me interested enough to go look up feedback from other users. This drew my attention to the realization that I do this with everything - I only look for whatever i'm looking for... I no longer pay any attention to discovery or suggestions. If I'm looking for HW, I'll focus on what it can and cannot do for the price and the actual first impression will form from using it, if it's SW - same deal, but actual first impression will form based on cross-platform compatibility, state/quality of documentation. Oppose to me, back in the day, where I'd just pick it up irregardless and "flubbed it" along somehow until it worked out.4 -
#Breakup #GettingOverEx
So my ex broke up with me/ we decided to "go on a break" three months back. It didn't help that my ex is part of my close friend group and I'm obliged to run into them every other weekend.
None of my close friend group knows what transpired/that we dated.
They started dating someone new as soon as we went on a break.
As a part of new year, I decided to mentally move on. Now my ex is trying to reinsert themselves in my life (unsure in what capacity- as a friend/reltnshp).Today, I woke up dreaming about my ex and their new flame and feeling pretty disturbed. I don't know their status quo either as I haven't talked to my ex about it. (Just know it as friend group mentions them here and there)
I had initiated communication with my ex as I needed an advise (on phone) and they kind of self invited themselves to my place on weekend. How to cope with all this mess. I am unable to focus on my work because of this and my productivity is shot.
I just want to move on and date someone who makes me happy/is worth my energy.
How do y'all process breakups/get over ex?10 -
Just finished rebuilding a personal website , pretty normal just a link aggregator I guess and I have got over 160 lines of vanilla CSS but only 15 lines of JavaScript. Is this normal lol ? I think I focus too much on design and "aesthetics" .
5 -
!rant
I'll be the first to admit that my web dev skills are average. Where I work we don't get pushed much since we work off of a very limited (custom to us) platform, which doesn't leave one very well rounded. I am very good with CSS/HTML/FLEXBOX/RESPONSIVE DESIGN and have minimal skills in PHP and JAVASCRIPT. In school I've dabbled with SQL, but hell if I remember much (beside key, the whole key and nothing but the key). What other languages or codes do you recommend learning; what's hot right now? Or should I focus on putting higher emphasis on the ones mentioned above first? I am a front end developer and don't plan on ever doing back end so not looking for the toughest of the tough - just something that will help me grow and land a better job. If there's any cool learning sites you know of too, or other tools, please let me know.3 -
Take a walk, or focus on something else for a while, then after I've had a break I can return to whatever the problem is.
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Reading books. When you are used to focus on long texts, those sw related books are not scary anymore. I can finish reference material easily if it keeps my attention.
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Some days: I have a completely perfect focus on my BAU tasks!
Other days: It's difficult to focus on my BAU tasks. Maybe I'll slack off in dR for some time.
Recent days: Impossible to focus on BAU tasks. Impossible to focus even to complete reading a single rant in dR.
I am an apolitical person, politics don't bother me. The pacifist inside me is yelling "STOP THIS MADNESS!!!". This yelling is why I can't concentrate. It's not like ANC Headset can block out this scream....3 -
building upon the love/hate relationship that I am building with web dev . (prev: https://devrant.com/rants/5111653 and https://devrant.com/rants/5112673/)
in the last 3 weeks, I have been trying (in vain) every weekend to get a hang of HTML/CSS/web dev, and the best I was able to do was to list down the various tags used in head and what element is...
and yesterday I said "fuck this shit, I know bootstrap!" and in last 48 hours I have been able to make a homepage, authentication page (login/signup/forget pwd), a course listing page and playlist screen without a video player.
it's the wrong way of doing front-end, but I made progress :D
at least now I can focus on what I really wanna do, the backend. hope I get some good tutorial/video stuff on spring+gradle+kotlin, I don't really like XML-based java beans and stuff in spring boot.
I know tidbits about node too, but the moment am gonna jump into that shit, I will be bombarded by es5, es6, functions/lambdas/classes doing the same things, jquery, elixir, and what the fuck not.
I had learned java from a teacher in a classroom course, so i kinda know how java works and how to dive into it, but web dev is soo much awkward to dive in, I get totally lost.
however, in retrospect, I feel I do have a little bit of knowledge of being a "fake" web dev 😅 . I checked out some of my old repos and I have been trying to get into "making" web projects since 2019. back then I found a brad traversy's video on Bulma CSS, which said "no CSS knowledge required" and that guy literally just wrote everything in an HTML file and was able to make a beautiful-looking website via just 1 file!
since then I have been practicing with bootstrap and bulma and have really got a knack of using those classes. i still don't understand the magic that goes behind flex or grid, hope i am able to have enough knowledge to create a framework of css or js like these awesome bulma/bootstrap!! 😄😄9
Best mentor: https://devrant.com/rants/5266128/...