Filling a form :

Normal Person
Name: Jim Jennings
Comment: Nice Post

Developer
Name: asfsafsadsa
Comment: asfsafsadsa dsad sdfs fa

Today I realized that I hit a total burnout. Last 3 years were extremely stressful for me (4 jobs in 3 different countries, exhausting and toxic relationship, bad habits). Last 7 months are the worst. I became lonely isolated and miserable. I learned to rely purely on stress, determination and validation to get through my days. Was supressing my emotions for a long time just to focus on making the money. Its time to break the cycle.

Im done with this. Next week Im quitting my fulltime job. Saved enough money for starting capital of my own dev services company. Built three projects that generate stable income to cover my living costs. Now finally I can take a long break to recover from this burnout and to heal myself. That poor persons mentality that I had from my poor family has been shattered. I achieved what I wanted in terms of having the money and gathered enough experience necessary to survive anywhere.

I managed to get through all this shit on my own with barely any support. People around me were draining me more than actually helping me. But I managed to do it and now its time to focus on myself, to heal and restore love for living. Im safe now.

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

Making a popping sound with my mouth when I do an array.pop() or git stash pop. Every damn time.

TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).

So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.

I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.

Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.

I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

thou hast committed a grave sin

I download a lot of different stuff all the time. Often times I don't actually get around to cleaning it up. Thus, I decided I needed to build a script to further encourage my bad habits.

Here I've built a script for both Windows and Linux. It's designed to take all the files in the current directory and move them into their own folders based on their extensions. Why is this useful?

It's fucking useful when you're not having to swim through fucking mountains of content.

Anyways without any further ado here are the scripts.

Linux

#!/bin/bash
for i in *.*; do
filename=$(basename -- "$i")
extension="${filename##*.}"
extension="$extension"files
mkdir "$extension"
mv "$i" "$extension"
done

Windows

@echo off
for %%i in (*.*) do (
if not exist %%~xifile md %%~xifile
)
for %%i in (*.*) do (
if "%%i" NEQ "movingFiles.bat" move "%%i" "%%~xifile"
)

I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.

Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll​ have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.

Three months in,​ colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.

I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.

A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.

Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.

I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.

I didn't even get answers for my questions.

Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.

I want to quit so bad.

It bothers me that IntelliJ IDEs and Documents on Google Drive don't require Ctrl + S to be pressed to save a file.

That's like my birthright taken away from me!

Got a call from Google!

Asked for two months to study: Discrete mathematics, Calculus, introductions to algorithms, design patterns, CTCI and linux/unix OS workings in general.

I know I'll be banging my head against the wall and I don't have my expectations too high. But regardless I feel like this is a good excuse to speed up my studies and push myself in the direction I want to go already. It'll be a win-win even if I don't land the position because I'll definitely gain a ton in the process of preparing.

I will be expose to all of this material (except for calculus because I've been learning it for a couple of months) for the first time so I know it'll be a challenge and I am looking forward to it.

If any of you have any tips on good study habits that'll be much appreciated; I currently like to read most of my material and supplement with videos/tutorials... Khan is great but they lack material on discrete mathematics unfortuantely. Thanks in advance!

Wish me luck (:

So many bad dev habits...

But the one that results in the biggest headaches afterwards?

Me, when given a problem and being asked an estimated time: 'This shouldn't be too hard, gimme X to do it', only to later find out it's way harder than i imagined.

I kept ending my Google search with a ;

😂😂

What Keeps u awake all night
(When u have to complete a project overnight)
1. Cigarette?
2.Weed?
3. Coffee?
4. Tea?
5. Redbull?
6. Beer?
7. Glucose? (As in my case 😛)
8. Anything else?

Me: Gets idea, buys a domain name
Me after 2 months: Looks at expenses, questions impromptu spending habits on domains

Once one of my coworkers tried to prank me while i was afk and changed a line in my code.
Good old habits of mine instantly realized the file's unsaved status and i could ctrl+z without even knowing someone edited my code.

Don't mess with a developer. We know our shit.

oh man... I just spent 12 hours in the zone and made what was originally meant to be made by 4 developers in close to two weeks(coding in free time)

Aaand I also drank too much coffee...

And I've done it in Node.js which I basically never used before :D ...I applied my coding standards and habits that I use when writing Java and it went like butter... ES2015 is pretty ok actually 😊

- Hey, have you heard of devRant?
- Look I have been a developer for more than 20 years; new IDEs, editors, languages or whatever that is, appear every week and they all just die. I'm sticking to my guns and nothing you can say can convince me to even look at this devCrap or whatever it is.
- Oooooookay...
#devCrap

Stop fooling yourself by thinking that the hurry & pressure will eventually go away if you work overtime & stretch yourself to heroics weekly. They won't, and they never will (and even shouldn't). Focus on building sustainable habits that propel you towards your goals day by day, and don't give up until you're where you want to be. Period.

The wife and I decided (together) to change our daily habits and get up early again (together).

It's 6am now, I was rudely awakened by overtly excited dolphin noises (the alarm I set), crawled out of bed towards my coffee machine (for an intravenous pick-me-up) and now sit here, in the kitchen, half an hour later and alone, all while she's sleeping like a beautiful perfect little angel.

I am contemplating whether or not I should powerbomb back into bed to wake her up or just brush my teeth and leave for work, letting her sleep.

Which would be worse, because she'd sleep till, like, 10am, be late and all that.

Well guess what.

Idea: if I want to be successful, I need to have good habits, because I am in autopilot mode 95% of my lifetime.

Do you guys commit after your code works or when the day is over?

I know some people doing this!

When you try to clear term in messenger.

Fuck my life. I shouldn't be allowed to programming before midday.

I had this one teacher that sucked some serioud dick. She refused to teach us what she was supposed to... Java.

Her teaching habits include: talking about her life problems for the whole class until the last 5 minutes to actually teach us knowledge that usually ended up being useless, refusing to answer questions and demanding that we use Google instead, and worst of all... the way she checked our programs to see if they would work. The absolute FIRST thing that she would do when she sat down at our computer, was open up our code, to see if it looked EXACTLY like her fucking code. She wouldn't even check if it worked first...

Honestly, teacher's like this completely piss me off and the students of this class learned more from the students with pre-knowledge than they did from studying the notes that the teacher gave in the last five minutes of class.

I started learning python tonight to knock out some quick assignments, coming from a Java/C#/C background.

Must resist urge to put semicolons and brackets everywhere.

So, my direct boss and I work from two different offices in two different countries. We are together in Scotland right now.

I used to have concerns about our relationship due to some issues we have had in the past.

What I realize this week, is the issues I have with him are exactly issues I have with myself. We are very similar personality-wise.

So really, I dislike many things due to them being my own negative personality traits.

I was going to leave the company when I get back, but I have decided after this week I will work on my personality and soft skills, I get a lot of leeway from him in regard to this, I am sure I would have already been fired anywhere else.

It really isn't a bad place to work, sure I could make significantly more somewhere else, but really, this company is good for the long game, it is stable, it is a brand, it is large and profitable (has been around 101 years) It is mostly a non-US company.

Lots of room to grow and expand IF I stop being a pretentious asshole.

The one issue I have is I am an only developer in my department, so I get overwhelmed quite easily and I lash out verbally and generally say the absolute wrong things to the wrong people. My boss protects me in this respect, again I most certainly would be fired anywhere else.

Also, this week I am working with a developer from another department, turns out, I don't like working with others as much as I thought I would. I actually like being in control of every aspect of the project and dealing only with my own code.

Lastly, I have noticed the same thing months ago when I was going to leave, and realized my faults, BUT I do good for a month or two (just like my boss does) then fall back into old habits of being pretentious hateful asshole without realizing it.

Anyone have any suggestions to catch myself before I lash out negatively or recognize when my attitude is falling back to default state?

I mean I acknowledge my faults, I am trying to change, and I do good a few months, but I forget that I am this way and simply return to what I do not want to be. Most people do not like me (they don't like my boss either, and they all talk behind our backs) which I really don't care, as I said it turns out I have issues with him because he is so close to how I am. I just want to recognize when my attitude starts declining again so I can remind myself all the good I have and not lament about insignificant bullshit.

Am masters student right now: have a couple complaints.

1. More professors with experience. The best professors are just the ones who've actually done the job. Surprising. More below.
2. Force actual curriculum. I didn't think this would be a problem going into grad but it really is: the label of the class does not have anything to do with what is actually being taught.
3. Professors need to post their assignments. If it's due next week tomorrow at 7am it is NOT acceptable to say "I will post the assignment tomorrow" and not post it till next week tomorrow at 6am.

As for the actual languages taught: yo all you guys need to actually ask your professors why they chose the language. They actually have legitimate, well thought out, reasons for why they chose it. Usually it's "I want you to learn the fundamental concepts, and learning a language of \" practical\" use is impossible to predict and you can RTFM anyways" which is a damn good answer.

What I think is the best change: professors who've done the job aren't "better" at teaching. They all just say "yeah school isn't what you're going to end up doing" so they alter their classes to look more like having an actual job. You get more "prove competence then, show me your git skills". Grading on how much you can do on vague assignments. One of my professors likes to randomly add features to our assignments and keep changing deadlines.
Those keep me learning on my feet, practicing, enforcing good habits, because my good classes I have absolutely no idea when I'm going to be absolutely fucked by.

TLDR: Professors who have actually worked in the industry or at minimum know what it's like teach wayy differently and much more effectively.

I am getting better and better. I no longer leave ":w" at random places in Google Docs... Now I'm just "cmd-s"-ing regularly.

I have gotten so used to code with dark themes (I even made Devrant from standard light to dark theme) that everytime i see someone with a light themed text editor, my eyes cry a bit.

My co-workers are so nice. They said I can talk to them anytime if I get bored and to feel free and ask them to join me whenever I'm hungry and want to eat outside. Of course, I did what every grateful, social animal would do:

Sit in front of my desk for hours pretending I'm not hungry despite my stomach growling and packed lunch in advance so I can eat them on my desk tomorrow like a pathetic, friendless loser.

You can't separate me from my desk. My desk is my soulmate. I live here now.

There is absolutely no reason, what so ever, that you should ever own a fucking Wi-Fi enabled washer and dryer!

Like if you really need to check that your kids haven't done the chores while you're at the grocery store, from your phone, you have some bigger issues. You're basically giving LG the ability to make money off your laundry habits for years and years after your purchase.

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

I’m a devRant virgin and also a new dev so...
Anyone got any general tips for a newbie? For example, what are some bad habits that newbie devs should avoid picking up? Good habits?

I use "x" and 'x' interchangeably in the same JavaScript file

Java gives me weird habits;

sometimes we try to make things better and realize people just want the same old non functional bloated shit...

Anybody have the bad habits of biting nails down and sometimes tearing the skin off finger-tips just because licking the blood is somehow calming?

If so, how do you combat it?

Looks like most of the devs are broke due to their irregular spending habits.

Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time, I've been programming for the last 6 years, day and night, I know more than all the teachers I've had for the last years (including university), during programming classes at university I'm just there to help my friends and try to avoid they get bad habits (our professor didn't have this luxury apparently), but I don't feel the emotions I used to feel when I started, for the last month or so the only code I've written was two days ago to help the girl I like, when I'm home I try to force myself to code but I can't find the inspiration, I stare at the screen for 30 minutes, I reboot my pc, start windows and play videogames 'till night...
Then I go to youtube, and see artists and musicians, I feel like I can't do anything that cool...
Have anyone of you ever felt the same? What did you do to recover? I still love programming, but I can't find any reason to do it, I still don't have an original and interesting concept for a game, I have many side projects in the "maybe I'll continue it" stash, is there something wrong with me or is it normal?

I'm currently working in call center. Making them a management system for agents. I'm the only developer there. No one asks about the progress even the owner doesn't know a thing about softwares. This gives me a freedom to do work when I want and how fast I want. But because of this I don't care anymore about the little things. and I have adopted some bad programming habits during my stay. Should I quit or what?

There is an error in almost every file, and yet this seems to work

On other days there is not even a single error and still it cracks.

Android Studio, you need to watch your drinking habits -_-

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

Beings of Devrant - what makes a person a bad programmer?

When you use the expression c++ in your c++ program

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Worst justification for bad habits?

Why so much hate for Windows? I can do all the scripting that I do on Linux on Windows as well. AutoHotKey for the win! In fact, the hacks that I can do on Windows directly cannot be done on Linux unless I have the terminal open. I'm still learning, yeah, so I'll learn how to do that in due time, but I've never had any issues with drivers, software issues, or security threats while using Windows.
And Windows Defender is so good now! I don't need an antivirus. Well, good browsing habits and common sense is enough of an antivirus so it's a moot point anyway.
Either way, I like embracing the power of AND. Why choose? I love both Windows and Linux!

Recently did a food intolerance IgG test and turns out I am dairy intolerant. Fcking dairy intolerance might have been the reason for all that fatigue and massive migraines which I had for the past few years. Cutting out all of it and hopefully that will improve my health in the next few weeks. Previously I tried lots of other shit (changing habits, leaving stressful work environment, fixing sleep patterns, cutting caffeine smoking alcohol you name it) and turned to this test as a last resort.

Just a little poll for you guys :)

Do you comment your code during the development or when it's done?

Do you keep track of the documentation during the development or after?

Do you use Git only for source control or also to work from multiple places and keep the code up to date?

Do you sh*tcode on purpose (or don't make any effort to clean it) when it's not for yourself, or not for something you value much?

If you have any other strange habit, feel free to mention it :)

Travelled for some hours today.
While i was on it i remembered a PDF "The Pragmatic Programmer" resting in my phone.
Opened it and read it until the bus reached the destination.
I entered the bus a complete idiot and upon exit i was half Socrates of programming habits.
Had read some chapters though.

Why didn't i know about it before ?

*sigh*

So we have this supervisor that I’ve mentioned before in my previous rant(read if interested). This man has been a pain to my side since I started working here. He does a phenomenally good job at being a douche bag and he has the need to resort to screaming and yelling if you happen to disagree with his methodology in any point of you. He likes to make fun of and be little you as well. Oh and I’ll mention he does it in front of all your co-workers. All bad habits and even less from some one in a supervisor position.

I think I’m a pretty reasonable guy, I try to get my work done only asking for help when absolutely necessary ie idk what’s going on or I’m stuck. This guy has the bad habit of breathing over your shoulder while you’re working......... Anyway I hit a breaking point today and waited til he was in his office to confront him.

I asked to walk in politely and asked if I could close the door it was a personal matter. After I sat down and vented to him explaining that what he’s doing with this egotistical persona of his is wrong and it’s creating an environment that cause everyone to feel like shit thus cause lowered work efficiency. I told him that belittling and offending is a bad tactic and that we are grown ass adults. It shouldn’t be necessary for you to yell or make fun of me, shit if I wanted to eat yelled at I’d go home to my father. He’s allowed this guy is not.

Well cutting it short I finished the convo and he didn’t say much just agreed with some points and stressed others that would be too much to mention. I’m not dumb either I recorded the convo just in case he tries to pull something. But I get the feeling like this is gonna turn out really well or it’s gonna go south.

Just wanted to rant to the rantFam first.

I’m done now.

Worst career choice: Not programming when I was younger because someone told me I would pick up bad habits. As a result if feel behind some of my peers at University.
Best career choice: I'll let you know when/if I have a career.

So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.

Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).

Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did

After being an active developer in the industry for about 5 years, I still have some bad dev habits on which I'm working on:
- Starting off with the code first without a proper design in mind/paper. (Trust me, I'll always regret of not having a proper design later)

- Writing long method bodies and not refactoring them later. (Because sometimes I turn out to be a lazy ass)

- Duplicating code in some places without reusing some.

Worked on a WordPress Multisite project that required digging around to find ways to hook into areas that weren’t meant to be hooked, create and add custom core files that would withstand updates, ensure certain plugin capabilities were available even if the current site didn’t load them, and a variety of other black magic that I’m too fried to remember off the top of my head.

By the end of the project I more or less felt like a god in WordPress—There’s little I could ever want to get it to do that I didn’t know how to do.

Then again, this is all probably a long way of saying I learned some very bad ways to do things. Mercifully, it’s fully documented with PHPdoc blocks down to the loop level so that even a 3-year-old should be able to figure out the logic...

All this to say, I’m definitely ready for a new project.

Which PC / Mobile Games you guys are playing?

I was playing League of Legends till last month but it's too TOXIC and Riot doesn't care.

So I stopped playing it from last month and started 100daysofcode challenge but as a gamer I can't survive without good game (lame).

Now I think I lost my habit of playing game like drug addict( but Still when I am bored with coding I prefer to watch YouTube).

What you guys do when you are bored with coding??

This is one from when I was in school, so I wasn't a dev but it made me feel like a CS student badass.

A class mate and I were having a discussion about his study habits. Basically he was freaking about the mount of studying he was going to have to do for this class:

Me: dude, you need to relax. You'll do fine.
Classmate: no, have you seen the amount of work that is on the syllabus? The size of the book?
Me: wait you bought the book? Also we took this same professor for several classes. His syllabuses are always huge. What did you get in the prereq to this class?
CM: an A.
Me: there you go.
CM: but I had to study all the time. I had no free time.
Me: really? I had an insane amount of free time.
CM: what did you get?
Me: B+.
CM: See but I did better than you.
Me: yeah . . . but I had fun last year.
Professor: you know, it's hard to tell who is the better student. The one that had no fun, but got an A. Or the one that had a lot of fun and got a B.
Other Classmates: probably the guy that got the B.

Hurray for peer and professor validated laziness.

Just saved a co-worker by having an installer from 8 months ago in a folder called "desktop", 4 levels deep in folders called "desktop", all on my desktop. My hoarding habits finally saved the day!!!

"Someone studied rich people for years and this is the five habits you should start having"

FFS, if I read this headline one more time...

Having the coder anxiety, can't finish code in one sitting, getting anxious, not eating because cannot eat while in the middle of something "important". Trying to finish it anyway, getting more tired, staying up too late, losing concentration on the next day and doing it all over again...

I just hate how my body believes that coding time and snack time are synonyms. Like ok, i might have been eating some chips or noodles while i was doin' the thinking, but hell, i cannot just empty 2 or 3 bowls of food each time i have to open and IDE.. How can you guys keep yourselves busy from eating when you fight the evil forces of bugged code?

Feature to spam people everywhere. A frigging set of apis where you can spam sms to people based on their habits. I am sorry for this shit. Even I'm not safe from this.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi,
Math and theoretical CS,
Graffiti (this one is just a sketch tho),
Wandering around (for long time and distances),
Bike riding (before someone steal it),
Sky watching (with naked eye)
and I have other not-so-popular habits that I have, but I don't know if they are considered geek.

When you check out your personal project at work on lunch... to find that you forgot to push.

you know when you start with computer at 9 years old... and you hate calligraphy class and typing feels the same and thus you skip it and now you are hitting a wall because you are not using enough fingers to be more productive at the keyboard!! 😡

I right now have a rag over my hands at the keyboard and am taking typing lessons... and my brain is not happy about it!

Got tangled up on some routing issue with my Rails project yesterday morning so I democratically decided I was allowed to take a break... I launched Diablo 3 and that was the rest of the day...

I just sat there dungeon crawling, eating pizza, ice cream and drinking Monster like a fucking pig... Shame on me.

Stop commenting out code blocks!

Either fix your shit or delete it.

I am open to argue what fixing may mean, as it is perfectly fine to make your broken code not reachable, e.g. via feature flags or skipping certain tests. Yet never ever should you comment those blocks!

So you say you want to keep it for historic reasons? You know, that is why we use version control! If you ever need certain functionality back, you can restore that state.

Each decent IDE also offers a local history where you can even restore code blocks that weren't even pushed or committed. So use that!

Commenting out test cases is a really bad habit, as you have no reminder that you shall restore it.

And no, a TODO and a FIXME won't count as a reminder as you have to actively look for them. And we all know how well that goes, don't we? (One time, I found a typo of a `TDO`. So even with a regular lookup for TODO, stuff will slip.)

Each test suite offers you ways to skip tests if there are valid reasons why they should not fail the build temporary and they offer colorful feedback. Yes, that means that your tests won't be green, but guess what: That's a feature! They shouldn't be.

That yellow is a fine reminder, aka warning!, that you should really fix your shit.

Commented code screams: "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS DOING!" and it confuses the hell out of other developers ("Was this commented because of debugging purposes and should be active again or can I safely delete this!?") and adds verbose crap to the code base.

If you find yourself to be in a place that you comment code a lot, I also argue that your workflow is broken.

When you are using a decent debugger, there shouldn't that much of a need to comment in and out a lot of code in order to reason about your code-base.

Has anybody used Google Desktop?

Why did they discontinue? That was an important source to get access to user's private data and habits ;)

Any other better alternative?

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

If you have the potential to make people form habits or change them, you can change the world.

My biggest fear is once I start to learn another programming language is ill confuse it with the one I already know or have to unlearn habits that work well in my "native" language and it will be hard to go back. How do you guys do it?

Usual python code problems coming from someone who has been coding in Javascript and PHP (<--no pitchforks please). It's been months already but old habits still keep on coming back
- adding a semi-colon
- mixing spaces with tabs
- using a lowercase boolean
- adding an open brace when declaring a function
- forgetting the colon ( ;'s brother)

Giving an unrealistic timeline for a project. Got reprimanded a few times because of this. Oh and my procrastination habits do not help..at all.

Things I learned in this 2 month training in an IT company ;
- the way @marcerisson wanted me and my group project team to use Git (and kept yelling at us about ) is actually the proper, professional way of using Git
- there is a difference between an MVC model and a fucking pack of overcomplicated spaghetti code
- commenting your code and naming your variables properly IS IMPORTANT especially when another dev might read it 15 years later (i see you Mr I Name All my Variables With the Name Of the Function and A Number)
- « if it worls it ain’t stupid » also apply in a professional area
- where ´s my fucking rubber duck

!rant
Health.

This is a big thing I think. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm overweight and this job keeps me at a desk for long periods of time.

I ended up with health issues from a combination of a bad diet, a staph infection years ago, and not being active. So I've made a commitment to start walking - at least a mile a day.

I'm using Pacer + Apple Health on iOS to track my progress. So far, combined with a $50 bluetooth scale I picked up on Amazon, I'm losing weight. I also noticed that when I switched my mile walk to my lunch break, I'm coming back to my work way more refreshed.

I hope to keep this up and I've found the gamification of having apps track my progress is a definite plus.

Anyone else have any healthy habits of "health hacks" they've found?

I once found a bug that I couldn't figure out from the code, so I started putting log statements that would print out the variables on screen (yes I have xDebug, but old habits die hard). Then the entire website didn't load anymore and eventually the entire container crashed.

It took me an hour to realize I was trying to var_dump an object from the ORM, resulting in a memory overload since there were like 20 related objects that recursively tried to load all the data in the database.

In my defense, it was friday afternoon...

I just realized that I don’t write ‘home’ anymore.. it’s always /home or $HOME
Even on google maps!

Surfing porn in any browser’s Incognito Mode doesnt make your porn habits private.

Work office, using xencenter for viewing xenserver server, tailing some logs and manjaro (arch linux) for bash stuff, and a coffee for good habits hahaha

I want to adopt this habit of coding one fundamental concept/tool/.. every day before/after work. I already started doing it and I've been coding sort algorithms. every morning since last week, in Java.
What do you guys think should go on the list of things to practice regularly ?

So after programming in the Vue framework, I have developed a habit of Ctrl + S for anytime I would usually use Enter. I just typed in setting in the search bar and press Ctrl + S.

What are your habits you took up from programming and just cannot shake it down in day to day life.

Getting so comfortable in a language/framework that you do everything with it. Even if you have to shoehorn the hell out of it for a purpose it's not made for.

Sometimes i like to break my code on purpose, to force me to refactor those parts and rewrite them more efficiently.

I find it hard to improve existing, working code, because it limits me and it does not inspire me to come up with something better

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

Hi DevRant ! So me and my friend want to make an app. Just to see how it's done. We're both are okay with C, just learnt Java and we're looking for advices.
Do's and don't, how to get started, good habits to pick up, anything would be appreciated !

I have two bad habits that I try to get rid of:

- Googling instead of directely searching in the product documentation.
- Copy/pasting code instead of typing it.

What are your best habits or strategies to keep your system clean and organised?

I feel like working in Visual Studio is gonna lead to me developing really bad habits. Whenever I save, VS locks up for about 15 seconds, completely killing my momentum when I'm used to habitually saving all the time. I'm starting to consider not saving my work as often, despite knowing it'll come to bite me in the ass eventually.

¡Rant

I am a simple man, i see code in comment
I ++ it.

Me= simple;
While (On.Devrant) {
Cin>>code;// Cin as seen (through eyes)
I++; // that i increment it { got the joke?}
}

I'm wearing my headset even though there's no music playing!

Recently picked up golang for side project. Love it. I work with php everyday at work. I think golang is affecting my old habits - I have started to shorten my variables:

“length” -> “len”
“array” -> “arr”
“function” -> “func”
...

I've started to get more into the TOR idea over the last couple of weeks.

I know I'm way to "non protective" of my privacy but changing would mean I'd have to break many habits and stop using things I'm used to.

A couple years back (I guess it was in like 8th grade or so) I had a presentation in German (my first language) for an extra mark. It was about tor. In the process of researching all of it I learned quite a lot about it. All of this knowledge has stuck to me the whole time, unused.

Fast forward to today, I've finally decided to use the couple of bitcoins I have (like 15€ or so) from my home mining experiment to rent a vps for a tor relay. First, I was lucky enough to find a service provider that accepts bitcoin for a 3€. They advertised "Fair use Traffic", later found out, after committing for three months since I was like "yeah... will be fine", in the customer panel there is a graph that shows me that I have used x% of 1.5 TB... I guess the customer support will get an email from me asking what "Fair use" exactly means... But that's fine... Oh... And ipv6 wasn't a thing to be found...

To wrap it up... I've now got a 2 weeks old little tor relay <3

(I didn't wanted to put it on my main vps where I have 200mbit guaranteed at unlimited for 5€ a month since that's where I have my mail server running and a hidden service for my next cloud)

!rant

Do you guys live a healthy life? Or are some of us here like the stereotypical dev who sits behind a desk eating bad gaining the pounds while stressing the fuck over code lmao

Personally I use to be quite active but now I'm getting back into bad habits and have started to notice that I'm stress eating <.< and choosing dev work over exercise...

Using Bloodshed Dev-C++ and not wanting to change that for Visual Studio.

Transistion for VS wasn't simple, as I learned from the beginning od Dev-C++ and amount of 'hacks' that worked in DevC++ and didn't in VS were frustrating me. After a while I understood that DevC++ was a bad first choice IDE and things it did shouldn't have place, but habits die hard I guess.

Still like the lightweigh it had, tho. Wish VS was so simple in use at the beginning. :)

Pushing Changes without running the automated tests on my local machine.

My least favorite part of the world is the engrained habits within society (for lack of a better word).

These habits can be pretty broad but since they are so widespread, it makes it hard for people who value their privacy to stick to their beliefs and go against them.

Examples of this are like saying no to giving away some information, or asking for someone to delete something like a photo of you. Society is trained the other way. Society is trained not to be privacy aware and therefore reacts in a way that puts massive pressure on those who want to keep themselves more private.

I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with this already. Any tips?

Dear me, It's spelled feTCH. It's caused you like an hour between today and yesterday mispelling FETCH as feCth. Why use it at all? I mean it's there now but next time, why not use GET or REQUEST or anything that you will spell correctly 100% of the time and prevent confusion when autocomplete gets it "wrong" because "derp, fetchFoobar is defined, derp dee derp what did I do"?

It's been a long week when the target of the rant is my own dumb habits.

I did get a new keyboard but only a ding dong blames his tools. Something like that

What’s your bad habit during coding?

Me :
Ordering too much junk food to pull an all nighters

Is there a good place to post code and have people comment on the style or the logic? I'd love to start getting feedback on my code and break bad habits before they become too ingrained. Plus, our first project is a blackjack game, I'm working through it pretty well but I'm a little stuck and I think it's completely because I'm paranoid I'm not doing it well/right (even though I probably am).

Anyone here believes that good habits are the key to be a better programmer (write friendly code, learn something new, plan before code etc)

Any thoughts-suggestions?

!rant Just an observation. There is a lot of discussion about syntax. Should it be tabs or spaces or should the opening bracket be on the same line as the method/function. There is 101 languages and standards. Syntax varies and you just can't learn it all.

What is more important? Result or the aesthetics? If you come into a project you adapt. You use the syntax everyone else is using. If you are a part of starting a project you agree on rules of engagement and stick to them so the team works at maximum efficiency. If you lead a project you define the rules by adapting to your teams habits. Because in the end it's the working product we are after.

Golden mean.

Just started a new job feeling excited and pumped. But damn, different OS, different text editors, different colour and fonts, different key bindings. I always think I am good at adapting but I'm just a creature of habits as much as the next person...

Bad time management habits.
As for me, I've recently changed job and took some side projects and without some tricks (Getting Things Programmed) I would just end up shits creek without a paddle. I feel like I'm already in, but some tricks keep my numbers on the boards and I don't sink yet.
Also bad eating and no sport habits.

I'd tinkered with computers for a long time but the breakthrough moment for me was a robotics class in elementary school where I programmed Legos in TC Logo.

That summer, I made a washing machine with multiple cycles and a door sensor to interrupt the cycles.

Soon after, I played with the code for Gorillas in QBasic to fix a race condition when running it on my 486 at home.

When you have a coding issue you can't fix after numerous searching and debugging you give up and talk to somebody about it to see if they'd know what the cause is.

*40 mins later* the conversation is about security habits, cryptography coding and the ballmer peak.

Sit back down after the detailed conversation and realise I forgot to get assistance on the code issue.

Whelp! Maybe I'll look at refactoring now and perhaps start from scratch if I cant fix it. FML

How someone can think that the best idea to store a vector of physical values, knowing perfectly in which unit measure it needs to be provided for the back end to work, is to couple a vector of strings with the units, is beyond me.

Just found out that vending machine in my new workplace has this cheap Chinese noodle soups. I understand point of energy drinks and croissants but this... why?

I'm curious about the world : in your country, when a coworker leave the company is it in your habits to have a drink with him, give him some gifts and all ? Or what happen ?

I fucking hate when devrant refreshes the feed when I pull down but not release my finger. Especially most of the times I already start reading the second rant but it all goes away with a flick...

Happened many times I even started changing my screen touching habits in order not to fall into this pit but still sometimes it happens and arrrgh.

I like sorting by algo and rarely use recent. I’m on ios so I’m not sure if it also happens on android but damn so annoying.

Bad habits I know but, if I go for a smoke, jump to the toilet and get a coffee in the way back to my desk and stick Spotify on a long playlist I don't tend to move for quite an extended period of time and actually get Shit done. I also find do not disturb to be an incredibly useful feature in Skype for business

anybody else has a "polish notation fetish"? i never actually learned lisp, but since i first saw its style, i find writing functions like "+ 1 2" instead of "1 + 2" both aesthetically and functionally more appealing. i think the infix notation is just being kept because of well-established habits.

I improved a lot as a dev when I looked at code I'd written and compiled. You can learn a lot from looking hiw your habits and style affect the overall program.

I need 100% focus else just don't read any tutorial or see any codes, otherwise it's just a waste of energy and might causing new bad habits to form up.

If you don't write tests for your code I will punch you in the face...

Anyone else on devRant use Habitica for trying to track/improve habits?
Started using it and feel nice to get a reward for the little things you do :)!

P.s. if anyone want to join a party hit me up :)!