One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."

Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

After spending a few months on this site, what strikes me the most, is how unhappy a lot of programmers are.

It kind of makes me sad to see so many of you struggle with office politics bullshit everyday.

I have a confession to make.

I've never had a programming job, or freelanced, yet I have made a very comfortable living with programming and marketing for the past 20 years.

I make my living by finding niches where there is shit software, and creating a better alarm clock.

The first 5-10 years of doing this, I worked my ass off (throughout my twenties)
But during most of my thirties, I barely had to
work to keep it all up. I get residual income still
from stuff I did 10 years ago.

I'm curious if anyone at all would be interested in learning how to do this, quitting their job, for example, or, just having the freedom to write your own code without answering to anybody but your own customers. Many of whom you never have to talk to, they go to your site, they buy, and rarely ever send emails (if you do it right)

Everybody here has knowledge that is so bankable, yet they seem to just surrender to
asshole bosses and clients. It doesn't have to
be like that.

If you'd be interested in this, please ++ this.

I'm thinking of creating an online course about creating and marketing your own software, specifically for programmers like you guys. and girls.

I genuinely just want to see if there's interest. I hope that's ok.

Do not continue reading if you value your life.

Visual fucking studio 2015 installation. MOTHERFUCKER !!!

OK new project will only work on VS2015. Need to download it. OK, go to MS website. Project works with community edition. Fucking great. Download the installer. Run the installer. MOTHERFUCKER DON'T OPEN THE FUCKING BROWSER TO THANK ME, YOU FUCKING FUCK. Ok...Wait to download the packages. One fucking eternity later download completes. FUCKING GREAT. Proceed to package installation. After two fucking hours installation progress bar stays the same. Google "vs 2015 installation stuck windows 7". MOTHERFUCKING BACKGROUND PROCESS IS FUCKING STUCK AND INSTALLATION DOES NOT CONTINUE. FUCK YOU. I'VE LOST TWO HOURS. OK, stop the process. Installation gets cancelled. Run the installer again. STOP THANKING ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT :@ OK, check again all downloaded packages. All good. Continue with installation. Installation completes. MOTHERFUCKER WHY YOU WANT TO RESTART THE WHOLE SYSTEM ? FUCK YOUR WINDOWS UPDATES. Ok, restart and be done with it. SSD to the rescue. Try to set up the project.

MOTHERFUCKER I DIDN'T INSTALL THE C++ PACKAGES. WTF WERE YOU DOING ALL THAT TIME? OK, run installer again and install C++ packages. I SWEAR TO GOD MICROSOFT, IF YOU THANK ME ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, YOU'RE GETTING HATE MAIL.

Ok, installation completes. It's coding time. NO BITCH. VS2015 silently crashes after splash screen. :@@@ Google wtf is wrong again, turns out the C++ packages fuck shit up. Ok, pass some arguments to devenv.exe to reset. Restart VS. Ok, seems to be working now. Make a test project. Fucking awesome. Close VS and get the project files from perforce.

OK, files downloaded. Open VS again....

VS: "You're my bitch, you won't code today. Run from console and pass some shitty reset parameters"

YOU FUCKING FUCK. GO FUCK YOURSELF UP YOUR FUCKING ARSE. Ok, pass the parameters from console. Run again. Same "you're my bitch message" :@ OK, run with administrator rights, opens like charm. Run without admin rights again, "you're my bitch message". :@@@@@

Restart system, VS2015 finally opens project normally. Build project, 6934 errors.... :@ I'M DONE ! IM GOING BACK TO LINUX PROJECT. FUCK YOU ALL.

So at school the teacher gave us a MONTH to write a sorting algorithm in Java. I asked the teacher if that wasn't a little too much time.
Her answer:" I want to give the weaker people in class a chance."
Okay so far so good.

The day we had to turn in our code I asked around what algorithm others had choosen and if they had any problems with it.

Classmate A: "yeah we didn't know how to program it so we copied it from the internet and I modified it heavily."
Me *raised eyebrows*: "can you show me?"
Me: "but that's exactly the same like the first Google result?!"
A:"No look there , I added this line so that it works with my code"

That lying bitch just added bucketSort(myArr, maxVal);
In the main method.

Me"How is that heavily modifying?"
A:"Also I asked the teacher and she said it was OK to copy the method from the internet"

What the flying cunt is wrong with people. So you give us a month to copy and paste from the internet.
Yeah great teaching.
You are the reason why half the class can't program shit.

Thanks for nothing. 😒😒

First rant hope you enjoyed it.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

At customer site with my boss.

Boss: let's check this code which is not working

Me: ok (starting the debugging session)

I found this code, which was failing during the writing on disk for some reasons.

try
{
....
writer.writeline(some data);
....
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
....
}

Boss: ok it fails to write data but we need to, let's manage it like this:

try
{
....
writer.writeline(some data);
....
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
writer.writeline(some data);
....
}

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

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

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

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

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

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

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

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

Manager: !!

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

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

My boss isn't really a developer. He isn't part of the development team and doesn't know any technical details about the product. He doesn't want to code, "too much effort", he just wants to boss. But he wrote some php in the early 2000's and is really, really proud of his codecademy html/css badge...

And that makes him dangerous.

Today I hear him talk from behind his laptop: "Right, we have this page for creating management groups, but we can't edit them yet. I can fix that!"

This task is literally on the current sprint, but he doesn't know that because he doesn't attend scrum meetings and ignores everything people say to him.

Me: This smells like probable cause, let's look with suspicion over his shoulder.

Boss:
"OK, right-click create.blade.php -> copy.
then right-click directory -> paste.
now just rename file to edit.blade.php!"

I start walking to the office kitchen.

Boss mumbling in the background:
"Now all I need to do is just copy the whole method in the controller, change the post url in the form, and modify the <h4> at the top, so it says edit instead of create."

Boss, looking at me now:
"This is so easy... creating and editing is almost the same thing, you can just copy paste all the code from one template to the other! I don't understand what you developers are always complaining about!"

Me: *Hands him a roll of paper towels*

Boss: "What is that for?"

Me: *points at code*

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

So Last year December my cousin see's me making a basic 3D game in Unity and says he wants to do programming.

Me: No, you don't want that. Become a doctor like your parents want you two.
Him: I'll do it.
Me: Ok. If you want to suffer, i'll teach you some basic C#

Me: *Shows him basic C# code in visual studio*
Him: *Not paying attention* Cool. When can i make games?
Me: That's not how this works. Where do you intend to study?
Him: M.I.T!
Me: You better get your ass infront of that fucken computer, google and youtube the shit out of you, matter of fact i'll get you a shit bucket so you don't have to get up.
Him: I don't have to go so hard now, i'm only 16.
Me: *Facepalm* That's why you have to do this now.

...7 months later...
(Yesterday)
Me: Show me how you make a basic calculator application.
Him: I don't know how to do that, you didn't show me.
Me: *laughing*
Him: Whats so funny?
Me: You're screwed *still laughing*

Don't get me wrong. He's a smart kid. Just needs to fucken do something if he wants his goal.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

Attended one of the best meetups ever. To give you an idea how awesome it was..

Speaker took the first ~20 minutes introducing himself.
His intro card deck kept referring to himself in the third person (he is the only employee in consulting 'company'). Ex. "Mr. Smith began his humble career .."

The powerpoint presentation began with him clicking each page, not executing the slideshow (ex. pressing F5).
Finally someone asked "Can you make slide bigger?"

S:"You can't read that?..um..sure...I guess .."
Starts fumbling around the zoom ...
Dev: "No, can you start the slideshow?"
S: "I don't know what you mean...there...I zoomed it, is that better? Now I can't see my notes..just sec.."
<fumbles again with the zoom>
Dev: "No, not zoom, start the slide show, press F5"
S: "Oh...you want me to F5 it...OK..."
<he *clicks* the slide show button>

Finally getting into code, trying to get out of powerpoint ...
S: "How do I get out of this fullscreen?.."
Dev: "Hit escape"
S:"No..um.."
<keeps trying to click on 'something'>
S:"I see visual studio, but its not on the big screen... "
<keeps click on 'something', no one is sure whats going on>
Dev: "Hit Escape to stop the slideshow"
<finally hits escape, then able to put Visual Studio on the big screen>
S: "Ahh...there, I figured it out."

Speaker had no end of making wild/random statements like:
".Net Core is the future of Microsoft, if you're using .Net 4.5...forget it, its not even supported anymore."
"When I was at Microsoft Build, I asked them why not put all the required .Net assemblies in one directory. Looks like with .Net Core, they listened to me" (he was serious)
"I don't use SQL Server Mgmt Studio. Its free and it sucks. I use <insert a very expensive SSMS clone>, its great, you guys should check it out", then proceeds to struggle to open a query window to write some SQL.
"When you use .Net Core and EntityFramework, you have to write your own stored procedures. If a developer can't write stored procedures, he shouldn't be in this business."

I was on the edge of my seat, hungry for the next crazy bat-shit thing to come out of his mouth. He did not disappoint. BEST MEETUP EVER!

This motherfucker tried to fuck me!

Ok, here's the full story.
I applied for a quick job as freelancer. He told me I just had to implement stripe payment gateway. After finishing that he asked to save the user data from payment to the database, too. I added that. All the way he wanted me to work on his ugly project on a rotten server through cpanel. But I refused instead I uploaded a showcase environment on my own server.
After he tested my code and all was working as expected he again tried to make me implement the code right away into his retarded project before payment. When I mentioned that he has to pay me first he started bitching that he won't pay in advance.

At this point I left that fucker. Knowing that my feeling was right and this bitch never had the intention to pay for my work. He just wanted to steel my code.

Fuck you. I hope you get eaten in your bed by very hungry slugs one day. Like this one guy here on devrant.

Once upon a time there was a dev.
The dev had a resume that said he could dev.
We called the dev, he sounded intelligent.
We hired the dev, who was a bit green, on a three month probationary period.
The dev did very little.
When asked, we said he contributed to discussions, but seemed unclear about what to do, and maybe they could keep him as an intern if they wanted to have him at all.
They hired him. As a full time dev.
6 months later, that dev was shocked to find we could log into the servers with a privileged account.
We (his team mates) were sad.
We asked him to fix a few prod errors.
A little while later he said "Done!"
We then had to walk him through how to actually fix them, not just add a couple pieces of info to the table.
We were sad, again.
We asked him to fix some prod errors again.
We had to walk him through the process again
We expressed concerns to our superiors about his abilities because he was all theory, no hands on ability
They promoted him
We were sad
A few of us said "Fuck you guys, I'm going home"
They said OK
Now that guy is the only one that "knows" that code base
I get calls sometimes asking me questions.
I told them to pay me a consultant fee.
They said no
I said no
They called again
I laughed at them

Listen to the people who know when you ask them questions.
Listen to the people who know when they tell you there is a problem
Don't be like that company

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

Ok, so, to every pieces of shit out there that got a "revolutionary idea that will change the way we look at things" and who asks you to code it :

Fuck you, you sons of a cunt

No, i won't make your app on 3 different platforms for free, i'll make you pay for every platform you wanker, i'm a freelancer, i need money.

No, making database is not something that a little business cunt like you can handle, you don't even know what sql means

And fuck no, I won't make that shit in 2 weeks just because your peabrain thinks that it'll make mad dosh and that "It MusT bE eAsy to Do!!111", "a dating app but with a twist" won't work you gobeshit

If you want me to work on this shit, you give me money, specs and shit, you handle the rest, if it doesn't make money, it'll be your problem. I'm not your employee you wanker

Fuck y'all

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

Story time!

My exboyfriend used to code in php 5. It’s his favourite programming language, and I hardly teached him how to code in Python.

One day, I said to him: Hey schatz, let’s go to the sex shop ...
He: Oh yeah 😏
Me: ... and buy an elephant thong 😁
He: What?!
Me: Yes, a blue elephant thong for Php

Me laughed

Me: So?
He: No way!
Me: Please!!!!!
He: Ok. I’m working at a cultural events web page. When I got my first client, we’ll go to the sex shop and buy the “php thong”.

Well... I broke up with him before we could go to the sex shop 💔😂😭( for another reasons, not for the php thong, obviously)

Do you have any funny story like this?

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

A few weeks ago at infosec lab in college

Me: so I wrote the RSA code but it's in python I hope that's ok (prof usually gets butthurt if he feels students know something more than him)

Prof: yeah, that's fine. Is it working?

Me: yeah, *shows him the code and then runs it* here

Prof: why is it generating such big ciphertext?

Me: because I'm using big prime numbers...?

Prof: why are you using big prime numbers? I asked you to use 11, 13 or 17

Me: but that's when we're solving and calculating this manually, over here we can supply proper prime numbers...

Prof: no this is not good, it shouldn't create such big ciphertext

Me: *what in the shitting hell?* Ok....but the plaintext is also kinda big (plaintext:"this is a msg")

Prof: still, ciphertext shows more characters!

Me: *yeah no fucking shit, this isn't some mono/poly-alphabetic algorithm* ok...but I do not control the length of the ciphertext...? I only supply the prime numbers and this is what it gives me...? Also the code is working fine, i don't think there's any issue with the code but you can check it if there are any logic errors...

Prof: *stares at the screen like it just smacked his mom's ass* fine

Me: *FML*

Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”

<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”

===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

We hired a developer and he has very minimal experience. I feel most of our conversations end up going something like this.

New Guy: I'm not sure how to do this obvious task and I'm incapable of searching Google.

Me: Give me your hand so I can hold it and walk you through the process of copying and pasting code from stack overflow.

New Guy: Ok...give you my hand...right...how do I do that?

FML

So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.

I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months

"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.

A little run down would be:

- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.

- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).

- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.

- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.

- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.

- Indentation is a mess.

- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.

- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.

- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.

Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".

The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.

So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".

I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...

just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔

Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.

Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123

I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.

QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!

Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!

Working really hard, finishing tasks, upgrading servers. Cancel some useless meetings to finish up features, working till 2am to get a database migration working. Half of the platform is transformed, both customers and team are very happy about their accomplishments.

Boss: "OK, I think we're on the right path with these changes, but productivity and morale is honestly disappointing. Are you guys sleeping enough? You all look very tired and unmotivated!"

Attend all meetings, call boss at 7am to discuss random purchases like a whiteboard, run around the office holding a (broken, lol) MacBook, looking very busy & slightly worried. I shout random things at people across the office like "Nice work Gary!" and "Damn, you are on a roll Angela!". I initiate smalltalk with department heads, only to immediately disrupt the conversation by checking my phone saying "Oh I really have to take this one" (empty battery, lol). No one writes a single line of code for four weeks, and nothing new has been deployed by the whole team.

Boss: "I think it's commendable how productive the team has become this month. You guys are all so active and involved. A real improvement!"

"Your resumé looks really good. We would really like to hire you. But you need to do this completly job unrelated test/coding challenge first."

----

"Is the test Android related?"
"Yes"
*Opens Test* -> "what ist the complexity of this function (written in c)"
*Scrolls*
"Implement algorithm xyz in Go lang"
*Closes test and breaks something*

----

"You will need to Code on a small Android projekt so we can see how you work"

"OK, how much time will i need to plan for it?"

"Our lead dev decided to make it small so its only 4-5 days."

----

What is it with all this stupid hiring test these days? And what do these recruiter think?

Dev checked in code (I suspect purposely not inviting me on the code review invite) saying he "fixed" the authentication bug in the web service.

Um no, like I told you last week, the authentication error is because the load balancer wasn't passing the user's authentication to IIS.

If I didn't overhear him telling a user "Still getting the error? I don't know, we might have to re-write that service", he might have gotten away with it.

Me: "Wait, that doesn't sound right. If I hit the server directly, authentication works. Its an issue with the load balancer, not the service"
Dev: "Admin said the load balancer is fine and it has to be the service."
Me: "I don't buy it. IIS is returning the authentication error, not the service."
Dev: "I added exception handling and nothing is being logged. Must be something in the service configuration."
Me: "No, IIS performs the authentication, not the service. I explained that last week, remember?"
Dev: "Oh yea. What changes do we need to make to the service?"
<my blood pressure starts to spike>
Me: "None. Give me a sec.."
<we have other apps on the same server farm that work just fine, so I re-configure the service pool settings to match theirs>
Me: "See, now going through the load balancer, the service works fine. For some reason, the admin had our service set up differently."
Dev: "OK, I'll let the users know the service is fixed."
Me: "Service was never broke and I'm not leaving it in its current state. In the morning I'll talk to the admin and see what he can do to fix."

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

I'm the only windows user in my office(my only other choice was Mac). One of the salesmen walks in my office with his macbook.

salesman: what do you know about macs?

me: nothing, why?

salesman: well I just got a new MacBook and I can't right-click, is there like a setting or something I gotta click?

me: well there's no "right-click" by default on Macs, but I think there's a way so you can click with the right side of the touchpad and get the "command-click" you're looking for. stand over there quietly while I finish this function then I'll look into it.

*i proceed to fiddle with some code for 5 or so minutes while he stands in the corner*

me: ok so let's look at your MacBook... ok *at this point I jump on my computer* let's see what Google has to say.

search: enable right-click on mac

me: huh! look at that! Google gives you the answer right there, poof! like magic. now we just follow directions, system settings>keyboard and touchpad>enable click with bottom right corner. bam! anything else?

salesman: yeah, I want the little bar thing to go away *talking about the dock auto-hide

me: ok well that's called the dock, let's ask Google again...look, Google gives the answer again, without even needing to click any links, I could probably click these links and get more in-depth instructions, but right here at the top is the answer

salesman: wow man, thanks! I've got a meeting in 10 minutes and I never would have figured this out.

*before he leaves

me: here take this...

Interviewer: "Using this 2D array and calculate.."
Me: "This input isn't a 2D array though. Do you want me to parse or construct a 2D array then.."
"It is a 2D array."
"Uh.. ok..and if it's not what if we.."
"Look my notes say you must use this input, and treat it as a 2D Array"
"What if I wrote a function for a 2D array similar to this input, but actually a 2D array"
"You must use only the input provided"
Me: does rain dance code for 20 minutes.
Interviewer: "hmm, maybe it wasn't a 2D Array. I like your efforts but that's all the time we have today."

I promise I can code, sometimes. It does help to have correct questions to give correct answers.

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

When I asked my brother why he doesn't want me to teach him programming, his answer was: "Because writing code is dry and boring, like math."

Ok then.

What's the difference between a wasp and single loose hair?
Apparently none till the wasp stings :/

Yesterday I thought I had a loose hair on my neck.. ok, I shrug it off.. later again the creepy feeling.. shrugs off..

I continue to work, sumberged in code, wanting to find the fucker (bug, not the wasp/hair).. lean in to the monitor... 10 cents away from the screen... Ok, maybe that's it! Feels the hair on my back, near shoulderblades again... shrugging again more violently to get it further down to fall out.. nothing.. ok, got the bug, threw myslef back in the chair with substential force & BAAAAM!!! Motherfucking hair bit me!! O.o

I scream in horror & on top of the lungs (it was late, after work hours so I didn't expect anyone else still at the office) PROKLETA PRASICA (roughly translated to goddamn female swine).. I previously saw some green bug flying around the office and I thought that nasty thing bit me (didn't know they bite soo, much more horror for me).. O.o

Anyhow, I jump up from the computer and see my coworker looking at me all baffled.. I proceed to franticly take of my headphones and hoodie..thinking about wtf should I do now, I cannot get undressed in front of him (not for my sake, bra is the same as top of the bathing suit for me, but still..I don't want anyone suing me for impropper behaviour of undreasing in front of coworkers..), how the fuck should I get to the toilet?! O.o

C: Are you ok?!
M: Um.. sth bit me..wtf?!
C: There was a wasp flying around somewhere some time ago.. are you alergic?!
M: um..not sure, I don't think so..we'll see soon..

I proceed to the WC, to take off tshirt & check/kill off the fucker.. on my way there (walking funny to not press the hair to my body again) I got another surprise, another coworker was working late..

C2: Are you ok?! O.o
M: yeah, sth bit me, probably a wasp..

Ok, finally on the loo..ok, do not lock self in in case it escapes and you need help.. don't even shut the door. Check.. standing between the doors I contemplate on how the fuck should I take my tshirt off without angering the fucker even more and getting bitten again.. O.O

I lifted the tshirt up my back to let it out.. nope, not there..the creepy felling of buzzing around between my shoulder blades continues.. crap.. what to do?!

I stood there & contemplated the task.. ok, roll up the tshirt to the shoulder blades, not against the body (duh) to prevent further stings..tighten the fabric, so it cannot escape, quickly remove the band from the body.. done..reversed the tshirt and straightened it.. bzzz... Fucker fell somewhere.. Dafaq?! Was it really just a wasp?! If yes, no problem...but what if coworker was wrong and I got bitten by that nasty green whateveritsname bug?! Eeeeewwww! Is it poisonous? Gotta find it & kill it for good.. waited a bit, than saw a goddamn wasp crawl from under the toilet.. wasp!! Yess!! Stopm stomp fucker!!

I get dressed & go back to my desk..

C: Did you terminate it?!
M: Yup, fucker went on a toilet paper trip down the drain!!

I sit down, starting to get my headphones back on and proceed to work.., but before I could, one last gem:

C: CTO would say, thank god it didn't sting you in your finger cuz you wouldn't be able to type anymore..

M: O.O so true hahhahahaaa

Disclaimer - I like animals, but I freakking hate wasps..especially if they get under my tshirt to sting.. :/

I reversed engineered the network protocol for a game.
I uploaded the source code to GitHub and made a post on UC Forums.

I kept getting bombarded with messages from the same person, it went something like this:

Him: "I can't get this hack to work, pls send finish hack, thanks"
Me: "First of all this is not a complete hack. You actually need to know how to code to use this library."
Guy: "Ok, can u help me make hack for game?"
To keep this short, I basically told him:
"No. Look through the code, learn it, use what you learned."

Couple of hours later he replied:
"Ok. I look through code but don't know how work. Send me code pls."
From the kindness of my heart I made a extremely simplified wrapper for the already simple code and sent him the project files.

He replies with: "Thank for hack, I not able make it work. I build I try inject game but no work. How to run dll file."

At that point I gave up...

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

#include <rant>

So, in my class I have this one dude who also code, "Awesome" I thought when I first saw that he codes, he codes in c# and claims to know JavaScript.

So I hung out with him a bit on recess/break time, and I eventually found out that he is a d*ckhead

First of all, he claims that he can code ANYTHING, I mean triple A games, the machine that can find pi in 10 seconds. And I know that this isn't true, because he "can't bother" with showing me it.. whatever I think.

I also mentioned that he is a d*ck, why am i saying that? Because if you make an error he would just go, "there is supposed to be *insert random bullshit here* instead of *a typo that I made*, retard. You are honestly fucking stupid" Listen, I love when people point errors out, it really helps. But when you say it like that, it honestly makes me sad. One day, I was messing around with classes in python and he went "hey idiot! That's wrong! There is supposed to be a *random word* instead of *working code*". The funny thing is, HE DOESNT KNOW WHAT PYTHON IS. So I comment out the working code and puts in his c# bs there instead. And he just says, "it isn't working because there's a private class instead of a public class. Ehmm, excuse me? This is python, ok.

Oh and he told me I was a retard because I can't develop triple a games using pure JavaScript.

Any tips on dealing with the guy?

Ok. Yesterday I finished building my compiler I have to say: it was a pretty darn big thing with 7000 Lines of code.

I did it alone and with almost no help.

I wanted to give some advice in case someone wants to program a compiler. I knaw its useless in times of lex and yacc, but anyway.

-have a good idea for the language
-learn about parser/lexer
-learn assembler
-do it like me: output the assembler to a file and let it assemble/link by the linux standart-tools (call the commands)
-Have fun. Fun is essential in coding

I hope I was able to help people who want to build a compiler alone... Yau can always ask questions ;~)
-

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

tl;dr read the whole thing you lazy goat-molesting arse.

People. It's unpopular opinion time!
Windows is brilliant.
There. I said it.

Why? Because it has the balance of user-friendliness and customisability that is great for most workloads. Its enormous user- and developer- base allow almost anything you want to be done on it.

For instance, a few years ago I hooked up a MIDI synth pad to my PC and found an obscure program to use MIDI events as macros. I did not have to write any code, compile anything or any crap like that. (If you're a developer then you'll have no problem with that kind of thing, but not everyone's an über-technical nerd like you. Deal with it.)

I don't like Windows. But it's still brilliant for most people. All you Linux fan- boys/girls/helicopters are right to advocate it, but it will never expand its market share to more than the percentage of people who are developers, (unless it turns into a corporate enterprise (which it probably won't)). It has its flaws, but most of them will never affect the average end user. OK? Thanks.

Shit! I knew buzzwords were overused, but I just saw an ad and it is fucking jesused jambled bananas in the ass.

Starts with a woman looking out the window and there’s a tornado (seems ok for now)

The tornado approaches and IT IS MADE OF FUCKING NON MONOSPACED IN MY ASS FONTED 0s AND 1s. Bonus point: they are green !!

Switches to lines of GREEN code (kill my fucking brain with a pistol attached to your dick right now)
Probably JS or something similar in syntax.

And then: A FUCKING GUY LEANING OVER POINTING SOMETHING ON THE SCREEN! HIS NAMETAG:

Logan Paul
Blockchain

👏👏👏👏

And then some other buzzing asses armagedon en d of the fucking world bleeding edge vibrator buzzwords shenanigans.

Finishes with drones shot flying between businesses building with 3d floating words like

Blockchain!

Artificial Intelligence

Deep learning

Etc.

KILLLLLL MMMEEEE FU748-KFJV ING 3I6HT N0W $)&(&($8#;&(&8 jeiebc

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

Yesterday I stayed at home sick. Had a bad case of the EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA FROM HELL. Was feeling ok but could not walk away from me throne.

Went in today cuz the lead was not gonna be there and shit always breaks on Freyja's day as we all know.

1 and a half hours before we clock out and go home someone calls saying that students are trying to drop from classes at the last minute and our app ain't doing it.

I "fixed" the app last week and ran a small login test. It work so I thought it was fine. Stupid me for making unprofessional and retarded assumptions.

Manager freaks out. The entire school freaks out. Coworker lols cuz he ain't got to work on it. I start mind debugging the entire bitcheridoo.

45 minutes later...and I was able to successfully go through almost 15k lines of code of php/html/js code and fucking FIXED it with tests and all for real.

Went at it hard. Babe ass manager was like 0.0 and then (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Called head office and told them everything was undr control.

Dropped the phone like a mic. Mic drop.

Then I looked at manager and coworker and said "ya I fucked up, but I am still the king"

Both nodded in agreement.

Everyone got wet with my sheer awesome troubleshooting php master skills.

Got home thinking about how boss I am.

Fucking Texas af b. Can't touch this heat. The rangers still suck and so do the cowboys. The astros and the texans don't exist because there is only room for one. Go spurs.

Still have diarrhea.

Fuck yeah.

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

OK I'm going write some serious heaps of code, my commits will fucking ddos the repository!

All I need is some tunes to drown out the office noise. Hey this song is quite good. Haha Google suggests my favorite song from 2 years ago, let's give that a try next. Oh I didn't know there was a new album out... hmm but I don't like everything... lets find out which 2 songs are good enough to add to a playlist by skipping aimlessly through it. Come to think of it, this style is not really that great for coding, maybe something with less vocals. Oh I know, I'll see if I can find some postmetal goa triphop electroswing dubpsy remix of that on YouTube, that would be enjoyable. No... I like the original better, although I'm a bit bored with it, maybe there's a similar artist hiding in a corner on Bandcamp, or Soundcloud... hey that's a cool mix, I wonder where that sample is from, lets try to find it...

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

I've been lurking for a while but I had it up to here with these goddamned "js sucks" posts.

I'm not gonna deny js has severe design problems,
or that chromium is a motherfucking vampire
or that it's a goddamn pain in the ass to understand how to babel webpack + plugins correctly

that is all true.

the problem is that it's just a lazy damn circlejerk at this point where no learning is gained, with no outlook on any possible solution of these problems, let alone ANY type of actual collaboration to help the situation.

sometimes people don't even care to specify what is specifically wrong with js. It's just "js sucks" and that's it, farm ++.

slack is a ram hog, yes, yes, we know... WE KNOW.
every 5 days someone has to remind that!

is there any solution? why is it a ram hog? is electron the problem, or is the slack source code doing weird shit?
are there any lightweight alternatives to electron?

That's actual good conversation, but no, apparently it's impossible to drop the snarky tone for 2 seconds.

I think it's fine to point out defficiencies in applications, but it's not ok to shitpost on and on.

I would very ok with someone shitcomplaining about js is if they were doing something about it.

I'm still ok with people letting of some steam, I'm fine with people expressing frustration from direct work experience with js. I'm not ok with people and their ignorance and snarky comments and non helpfulness while comfortably laughing from their own camp of totally unrelated technologies.

Hearing sysadmins or people that code exclusively in c shit on js makes me feel my insides twirl.

Imagine I didn't do shit for linux, but I went around forums pointing out the defficiencies, like the lack of standards, and saying that mac is way better.

Or I if yapped on and on about openvpn and having an obscure as fuck api, meanwhile not doing a single fucking thing about it, or not even using it in a day to day basis.

do you hate slack's ram usage? me too and js isn't going anywhere in the next 5 years, so either do something or provide smart conversation, diagnosis of the problem or possible alternstives/solutions, otherwise stfu

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

>On a call with Manager
>he's showing off some code
>oh cool he's finally assigning me some real work

PM: So yeah, just wanted to have you on a call to show you how easy it was to fix this.

Me: ... Oh... OK.

PM: yeah so this was completely broken. The last guy that was working on this didn't do a great job. Like seriously, what is this? Amateur hour? Hahaha

Me:... Haha... Yeah, right... 🫠

PM: anyways I figured I would go ahead and do this because it would take me 10 minutes to figure out. It would probably would have taken you 3 hours or something to figure out.

Me: ok... <why tf am on this call other than for you to shit on my skills?>

PM: anyways just wanted to walk you through what I did and show you how easy it was to fix.

Me: ok.

Can someone tell who the fuck lets morons with absolutely 0 knowledge of how the industry works go on and write articles concerning "what programming languages to learn" clickbait articles?

Look, I never looked into them. Not even when starting, I knew (out of spite) that the people that built Windows Vista were developers and then I went ahead to look what a software engineer was. I went down the rabbit hole from that and my next step at the time (I was on the local library) was to go ahead and look for programming books, C++ and Java caught my eye, so I got them two books and went down. Later on I found about JS and Python and similar shit like that and I just continued to learn. I seldom bothered to learn from internet articles because to my opinion if I needed to read documentation then I might as well fucking read it from the people that designed X technology.

some were good, some were shit, etc etc, but I never bothered to look for "what programming languages to learn" articles because I could give close to two shits about some other dickhead telling me what to learn, I have always been rather hesitant to take other people's opinion into consideration when it comes to my own learning.

BUT today I clicked on one of those articles out of curiosity.....

"Many DEVELOPER (notice the lack of proper grammar) choose to leave Visual Basic in favor of more modern frameworks like C#, Java or .NET"

Ok, so, for whatever the fuck reason Java is mentioned along C# and a fucking framework (.NET) rather than just C# for microsoft shit, is this moron talking about VB.NET at all? is he going about VB6? what? what is going on here?

Obj C is not relevant at all and should be immediately replaced by Swift since it is a modern, and stable language (never mind that each release has breaking changes on entire code bases, yeah, fuck it, just jump alltogether and ignore Obj C and the decades of stable code it has)

"Coffeescript has been replaced by the newer features of Java" <--- ok fam, you lost me here, give me your "ITPro" card please and then kick yourself repeatedly in the groin since I won't be bothered touching you, i might get some stOOpid on me.

Fuck, these articles are all over the place, from idiots like the one above, to the moron raving about pharo smalltalk shitting on every tech you use.

Just.....please bring back shit like byte magazine and shit.....please? or Linux Format, make Linux Format more popular across the board, where people who know their shit think twice before spewing their bullshit to the masses? Some fucking kid there might want to know where to start and these fucking idiots are out there just ruining shit for everything.

A dev team has been spending the past couple of weeks working on a 'generic rule engine' to validate a marketing process. The “Buy 5, get 10% off” kind of promotions.

The UI has all the great bits, drop-downs, various data lookups, etc etc..

What the dev is storing the database is the actual string representation FieldA=“Buy 5, get 10% off” that is “built” from the UI.

Might be OK, but now they want to apply that string to an actual order. Extract ‘5’, the word ‘Buy’ to apply to the purchase quantity rule, ‘10%’ and the word ‘off’ to subtract from the total.

Dev asked me:

Dev: “How can I use reflection to parse the string and determine what are integers, decimals, and percents?”
Me: “That sounds complicated. Why would you do that?”
Dev: “It’s only a string. Parsing it was easy. First we need to know how to extract numbers and be able to compare them.”
Me: “I’ve seen the data structures, wouldn’t it be easier to serialize the objects to JSON and store the string in the database? When you deserialize, you won’t have to parse or do any kind of reflection. You should try to keep the rule behavior as simple as possible. Developing your own tokenizer that relies on reflection and hoping the UI doesn’t change isn’t going to be reliable.”
Dev: “Tokens!...yea…tokens…that’s what we want. I’ll come up with a tokenizing algorithm that can utilize recursion and reflection to extract all the comparable data structures.”
Me: “Wow…uh…no, don’t do that. The UI already has to map the data, just make it easy on yourself and serialize that object. It’s like one line of code to serialize and deserialize.”
Dev: “I don’t know…sounds like magic. Using tokens seems like the more straightforward O-O approach. Thanks anyway.”

I probably getting too old to keep up with these kids, I have no idea what the frack he was talking about. Not sure if they are too smart or I’m too stupid/lazy. Either way, I keeping my name as far away from that project as possible.

We all work on the same room: Devs and testers.
In order to communicate with each other without taking off our earphones, we use the chat app.
Ok, sometimes the chat app has delay sending messages.

I really, really hate when one of the testers comes to my desk without telling me he's coming to my desk! >:v and this is the reason why I hate it so much: I'm concentrate in my code, listening to ASP or SPA and, suddenly, I feel a heavy presence behind my monitors. I look up and I see a very penetrating gaze from the corpulent tester looking at me (he's tall). Every time he does that I almost have a heart attack D:

"There's a bug I want you to check" he says.
And I check my chat app if there's a delayed message from him. Nothing, NOTHING >:v

Always, when I want to go to his desk, I send him a message

"Is it ok if I go to your desk?" and he says me "You don't have to ask for it, just come here" but the thing is that I do that because I expect him to do the same :/

Fortunately this doesn't happen every day, but it pisses me off, and I don't know how to tell him to stop doing that because I don't want to be like a... jerk? intolerant? I don't know

so I have a junior who merged in a fix for an issue yesterday, and it was tested today and there was an issue with his "fix".

so he comes to me and says "hey this is an issue" and i'm like "yeah, remember i told you about that yesterday when i tested your changes? why did it get merged?"

so i tell him "its because of <reason> and that's why i specified the approach that i did in the ticket originally"

so he's like "ok i'll try that" and before doing that i leave him with "you will probably want to do <thing> because of <reason> with that approach"

so fast forward to like 10 mins ago. literally half the fucking day has gone by.

"hey, so i can't get this to work"

"yeah its because <reason> but what you /can/ do is <same fucking thing i told him to do this morning>"

"oh ok, ill give that a shot :thumbsup: "

and yet he's had this chip on his shoulder since reviews because he feels like he should have gotten a bigger raise and he's worth more than he's paid. and wonders why after 3 years he still hasn't been promoted from a junior.

and don't fucking say 'that's above my pay grade' all the time like you aren't fairly compensated, and then struggle to employ the same fucking patterns in a code base you've worked with for 3 years now.

It has been bugging the shit out of me lately... the sheer number of shit-tier "programmers" that have been climbing out of the woodwork the last few years.

I'm not trying to come across as elitist or "holier than thou", but it's getting ridiculous and annoying. Even on here, you have people who "only do frontend development" or some other lame ass shit-stain of an excuse.

When I first started learning programming (PHP was my first language), it wasn't because I wanted to be a programmer. I used to be a member (my account is still there, in fact) of "HackThisSite", back when I was about 12 years old. After hanging out long enough, I got the hint that the best hackers are, in essence, programmers.

Want to learn how to do SQL injection? Learn SQL - write a program that uses an SQL database, and ask yourself how you would exploit your own software.

Want to reverse engineer the network protocol of some proprietary software? Learn TCP/IP - write a TCP/IP packet filter.

Back then, a programmer and a hacker were very much one in the same. Nowadays, some kid can download Python, write a "hello, world" program and they're halfway to freelancing or whatever.

It's rare to find a programmer - a REAL programmer, one who knows how the systems he develops for better than the back of his hand.

These days, I find people want the instant gratification that these simpler languages provide. You don't need to understand how virtual memory works, hell many people don't even really understand C/C++ pointers - and that's BASIC SHIT right there.

Put another way, would you want to take your car to a brake mechanic that doesn't understand how brakes work? I sure as hell wouldn't.

Watching these "programmers" out there who don't have a fucking clue how the code they write does what it does, is like watching a grown man walk around with a kid's toolbox full or plastic toys calling himself a mechanic. (I like cars, ok?!)

*sigh*

Python, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc. They're all tools and they have their merits. But god fucking dammit, they're not the ONLY damn tools that matter. Stop making excuses *not* to learn something, Mr."IOnlyDoFrontEnd".

Coding ain't Lego's, fuckers.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

After 'Dev' deployed a service using Azure ServiceBus, a particular queue/client was receiving errors.

Dev: "Looking at the logs, client is getting faulted."
Me: 'What is the error being logged?'
Dev: 'Client is faulted'
Me: 'No, that is our error when the client is either unable to connect or there is an exception in the middle of sending a message. What is the exception from Azure?'
Dev: 'Client is faulted. That's it. I'm going to have to re-engineer the code to implement a retry policy.'
<OK, I smell someone cooking up some solution finding, so I dig into the logs a little further>
Me: "Looks like an invalid connection string. The actual exception being thrown and logged is from the Azure client connection string builder. The value cannot be null."
Dev: "No, I'm looking right at the connection string in the config. Looks fine."
Me: "Looks correct on your machine, but what is actually being deployed to the server?"
<I could tell he was getting agitated>
<Dev clicks around, about 10 min. later>
Dev: "Aha!..I found it. The connection string in the config on the main branch is wrong, in fact, the entry is missing."
<dev fixes, re-deploys, life is good, I document the error and the root cause>
Boss: "Great job Dev."

*sigh* ..go teamwork?

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

So this happened some time ago but I didn't know devRant back then.

In school we had to write some code in Java and before the lessen one of my friends said to me that he already knew Java and that it was like a very easy coding language.

Then, when we actually had to code, he was complaining that his code didn't work.
So I stopped coding, stood up and walked over to him. He had only very few lines of code and after reading the error message I told him that he was missing a semicolon in line X.

He then asked me what a semicolon was. At that moment I thought: Oh, it's just that one thing that you put after ALMOST EVERY LINE OF CODE IN JAVA. I showed him where I find it on the keyboard and then I fixed his code (it had way more errors than just a missing semicolon).

I have no problem with helping other people but if that person brags about how well they know Java and then not knowing what a semicolon was, that's just not ok.

Ok, so teacher (which should be something like a professional dev or whatever) assigned us a homework for a Christmas (I dont care, I can complete his assignments in like 10 minutes max). We have to do some simple shit in C++, just some loops and input + output. Nothing hard. He challenged me to write it as short as possible, so I did. My classmates have codes around 60 to 70 lines long (after propper formating). I made it 20 lines long using some pointer magic and stuff like that. I tried my code, it ran fucking perfectly, so I sent that to him. He replied that the code does not work. I tried to recompile it and it ran perfectly. Again, it does not work. Afeter 13 fucking emails he fucking finally sent me the error message. Some fucntion was not found (missing some library but literally everywhere else it works without it...). Thats strange, because it run perfectly on my Fedora with CLion, so I switch to Windows and try to run same code in Visual Studio (which we are using in school btw). Works perfectly. So I start arguing with the teacher more and more. I tried around 10 online compilers. Works fuckng everywhere. Teacher is pissed, me too. So I rewrote my whole code, added comments and shit, reinvented wheel literally everywhere. Now I have C99 standardised code over 370 lines long that run even on a fucking arduino after changing input output methods so it can work with it. It (suprisingly runs) on his PC too.

After a bit more arguing, he said that he is using CodeBlocks from fucking 2015. Wow. Just fucking wow. Even our school has some old Visual Studio (2007 I guess) and it worked there.

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.

Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.

First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...

Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem

The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....

Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing

His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question

Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡

Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff

Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!

Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.

Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.

First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.

Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.

Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.

Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.

I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.

Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.

Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

DO !!!NOT!!!!! USE 'X' AND 'P' TO 'CUT AND PASTE' A LOT OF LINES ACROSS FILES IN VIM!!! HOLY SHIT I JUST PWNED MYSELF SO HARD I LOST SO MUCH CODE HOLY FUCK IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY! WHERE DID AT ALL GO YOU ASK, WHY THE FUCKING REGISTER, OK LET'S CHECK THE REGISTER, COOL THERE IT IS, BUT WAIT, THERE'S ONLY LIKE 20% OF IT BECAUSE WE CUT A SHIT LOAD OF LINES AT ONCE, AND THE REGISTER OVERFILLED.... Ok let's calm down, doesn't Vim have a recovery option? Yes it does, but WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE, MY CHANGES ARE NOT IN THE SWAP FILE BECAUSE IT'S NOT LIKE VIM CRASHED OR ANYTHING, MY DUMB-FUCK-ASS WILLFULLY WROTE THE CHANGES WHEN I SWITCHED OVER TO THE NEW FILE, AND NOW, WELL THAT'S IT, YOU'RE DEAD KIDDO, YOU WROTE THE CHANGES TO DISK, NOTHING YOU CAN DO, AND I AM SO SCREWED I SPECIFICALLY MADE A DEVRANT ACCOUNT TO MAKE SURE NO ONE ELSE PWNS HIMSELF AS HARD AS I JUST DID HOLY FUCK

Update on my old rant: I started writing type definitions for our project (it's basically a chunk of separate files where you document the objects you use; typed languages have this out of the box, js doesn't and it may become useful depending on the size of the project). Our codebase is reasonably big -not complicated, but big- and I felt like I was losing track of all the properties\objects\usage\comments\whatever. So I iiterally wrote some ts interfaces: properties with name and types, that's it, so you know what you're passing around.
Proposal was denied, I'll have to delete the documentation; "keeping the doc updated is going to require more work".

Me: Ok, but what am I supposed to do when I need to interface with your code? Run the debugger and figure out what the fuck you guys are passing around?
Team leader: Yes 😊

!Rant

Story, only read this if you feel like wasting your time

Ok so I live in a small village and it takes around 15 minutes to get to the next city by car. I can't drive yet because I am 15 and so I would need my parents to drive me there. There are also no buses anymore which drive to the city after 2pm.

Most of my friends live in that city, none of them code. We always meet on a discord server and then play games or do some other shit. Today I got online at around 3pm and when I joined the discord server they asked me if I wanted to go see the movie 'IT' with them tonight, I said yeah of course (I am a huge fan of horror movies), but only if my parents come home early enough to drive me there.
Time passed and then my last friend left the discord server because he had to walk to the cinema.
I was the last one still on the server and also the one with the farest way to the cinema. I already knew that my parents wouldn't come home in time anymore and so I decided to just start coding something. I usually code while listening to some music and so I switched over to spotify to choose a playlist. I just randomly clicked on the first playlist spotify recommended me and the song started playing: 'Sound of silence'.

Fuck you spotify algorithm.

I know that not being able to go to the cinema with your friends is a fucking stupid reason to be sad but I just feel very sad right now. Sitting alone in my dark room staring at my computer screen.

Sorry for wasting your time

Debate (with rant-ish overtones):

FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.

Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.

The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.

Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).

The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.

Debate!

I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.

Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.

I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)

And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.

But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.

You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.

Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.

The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.

This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.

If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.

No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.

But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.

Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.

As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.

When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.

I fucking hate esoteric code.

Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.

This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.

As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.

Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.

Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.

That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".

I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.

It's just the community.

Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.

You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.

Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.

You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!

On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.

And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.

When will I fuckin learn that
a) customers lie
b) customers are sloppy
c) customers are wrong
d) customers do not do their work (properly)
e) customers want us to do their (dirty) work
f) possibly all of the freakinly above?! + khm....

They will fuckin aaaalwaaaays say sth is not working after the update..
And I will alwaaaays assume I fucked up something..even if I didn't touch that part of the code/data..
And almost aaaaalways it turns out that the bug they complain about is how the system worked (or didn't work) before the update and/or some fuckup from their side..

Anyhow, I rushed over, grabbed the files went testing in dev..wtf, output is different, mine is ok, theirs is..wtf is that shit?!

Transfer newly built dll to test..same shit as on prod..wtf?! How?!

I assumed they have thing A correctly linked to thing B.. ofc thing A was linked to thing C in their case and in another case (our test) to correct thing B..
I got chillies when grabbing files, that
I should have tripple checked that they didn't fuck up something on the link part, but I just assumed they know what they were doing & that they checked they linked correct files with correct content already, before being pissy that the update fucked up things.. riiiight!! :/

I wanted to find solutions to this fuckup asap so I disregarded my gut feeling..yet again!! Fuuuck!
I've spent too much time trying to find ways to fix a bug that wasn't even a real bug to begin with.. :/

Fuuuuuck!!

So yeah, always treat the customers like they are 3yrs old & have no clue what they are doing & check exactly wtf they were indeed trying to do..it will save you time & nerves..

And note to self: reread this shit daily!! And imprint it in your brain that everything is not always your fault!!

fuck you, man. eat a bag of dicks, a bag of shit and a shit load of dead animals.. you dumb fucking cunt ... go and die ... who the fuck modifies state of 3rd party object and think it is ok to do so.. the fucking prick deserves to get castrated with rusty, old school, gardening scissors...

through some mysterious, obfuscated, buried deep in the asshole code, the fucker decided to set a user-specific value in the default query params of guzzle so that every fucking object using it passes the fucking thing around like a cheap hooker at a dorm party... causing the API calls to misbehave because of the fucking thing.

you send the parameters you want to send but mister sucking-dick-up-the-ass-smarty-pants decided you don't want to do that and because of that I almost broke a core library a week before a fucking major feature release because half the functionality got broken automagically, worst thing is I have no fucking clue where the bloody thing gets inserted ...

I swear if you do that I will find you and I will get a rusty razor to cut your balls into paste and rectally infuse them untill your shit start to come out of every oriphise of your fucking empty head

sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.

The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.

As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.

Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"

I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.

Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.

The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.

I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.

Made me feel dirty.

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

I was helping my girlfriend's sister on her programming homework yesterday. But the thing is that she missed a lot of classes to be with her boyfriend. So now she has a reasonably advanced task, without knowing the basics.

Her assignment was to open a file, extract it's text, and count how many times an user-given word appeared on it. So here's how it went:

- so you use the input function to ask the user to type the word.
- ok, but where do I type the word?
- in that black screen, on the bottom of visual code
~ changes name of the variable that receives the input()~
-like that?
- no, that is just the variable name. You should type in that black screen AT THE BOTTOM OF VISUAL CODE
- oh, ok.
~ changes name of .py file ~

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

WTF, Google?! Get your shit together!! No one wants another GUI disaster makeover which leads us from bad to worse.

Every time I log into g+ or gmail, the whole flippin GUI has changed.. OK, it might be just my taste for simplicity, but I do not think a 'better GUI' should make you feel like an ape trying to code.. :\

If people with programming skills can't use it 'out of the box' & without googling stuff like "where did you hid the new email button", how the f do other people who are IT inept supposed to use it!? OR is it just me?! If it's just me, I'll shut up and love the new GUI.. otherwise: juck!!

#itSucksToBeOnTheOtherSideOfTheCode :\

I started at a company to develop an "uber" clone. Hired by the company's cto. I was happy initially as i had been unemployed for a while but that's because i didn't see the shitstorm coming. The task was build this using php, well 2 weeks later and db locking issues because mysql only allows 100 connections and the website takes over 200mb per request, i tried using the meteor framework, a lil better but the orphaned process would require me to reboot every 2 days. So enter erlang, built in 3 weeks works amazing problems none here... Well in comes the cto (which came in once a week). Apparently he had been reviewing my code and didn't understand it. He couldn't understand no for loops etc and demanded that it be made understandable to a normal dev. Did normal devs write uber no. Anyhow i spent the next 6 Weeks refactoring trying to make elixir looks like imperative programming, he finally gave up, so now I'm deep committed writing an API, finish in a week cto comes in and "why aren't you using patch" i don't need it, well another day implanting a patch api that will never be used. Ok done. Now we have a meeting with the investors who i worked in the same building with and they want a frontend built. I explained i was a backend dev and they needed a uiux expert. Next week cto comes back with this jquery fire pit and stolen bootstrap theme and take me with implementing it. This time we scrap the api change some of the backend logic and implement rest from the 90s one static page per request. After 3 months working with jquery I'm let go because of finical issues. I told them i was a backend dev but they didn't listen if the cto would've gotten a frontend expert things would be different but what to expect from a cto who's coding legacy is creating WordPress plugins.

Hopefully things will be better soon I'm tired of living on the streets.

Got my first laptop while I was overseas.

It was a windows hp laptop with Vista.

It was an absolute piece of shit.

Decided to find the people responsible of it.

Got to what a software engineer was.

Boss told me to look in the library to see if i find some books on the subject. Got a Java and C++ book.

Shit was hard af cuz I had no clue what I was doing, but I liked it. Decided to look more into an application wise platform of study rather than doing basic CLI shit. Got into web development with Java. Got a hold of more JS. Liked JS more cuz shit was easy, found about server side JS with classic ASP, did VBScript as well.

Eventually found Python, fell in love but hated the whitespace ussage for block level code etc. Found Ruby, to this day the most beautiful language according to me. Read about why's poignant intro to Ruby.

Dug it, but wanted some other things. Found out about the study of data structures ans algorithms, then harvard's free cs50 course, then mit courseware, rice's python class. Took all of them. CS50 introduced php, liked it, sounded like a drug, was easy to use, for whatever fucking reaskn my ass decided to use version 4 even though 5 was already out. Learned to appreciate advancements in programming language even more

Hipster phase, while studying php got more into JS and web design with more css concepts, wanted my shit to be pretty. Somehow landed with Common Lisp. Mind fucking blown.

Continued with php. Got into uni, math made sense through programming, ok so I am stupid, but not that stupid, python is the best calculator ever.

bring it bitches.

Graduated.

Still don't know what I am doing.

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(

THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN!

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

This is getting annoying.

For the past >half a year I've been chasing windmills. This is what my BAU day looks like:

- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs (actual runs are hell of an expensive (financially and time-wise) thing to launch) to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter (since apparently that genius did have a task to do that, so we'll most likely have to find a way to live with it)
- Restart the whole env (~30min).
- Launch a Smoke, Sanity tests to verify env state.
- Launch the actual test
- Go home.

Next day:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests pass.
- Run the actual test
- Concurrency on RDS database is sky-rocketing! WTF did that come from??? Nothing's been changed since y-day!!
- Spend ~1-2 hours looking for anything changed, dig some logs for anything unusual. Nothing.
- Escalate to DBA. 2 hours later DBA says "fix the app". thanks for nothing mate....
- Spend remaining 2 hours analysing AWR. Give up, restart the whole RDS instance. Another hour wasted.
- Time to go home. Out of curiosity run Sanity test -- all good. Run the actual test -- all good. wtf??
- Go home

Next day
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter
- ..... I think you know where this is going.

And this keeps going on and on, day by day. Spending the better half of the day chasing windmills and doing our actual work on the last hour of the working day or even after that.

We have plenty of interesting tasks in our Jira but we're squirels spinning in the wheel and never being able to touch them.

It feels like I'm wasting my time. I could do so much more with my time!

[just needed to vent ]

Shit Developers say:

Fuck you Jasmine and your camelCase

I’ve been wrestling cucumbers all day

Oh no all the cucumbers are broken

In a fit of refactoring madness I have gone and changed a lot

Did you seriously just give ME nil?... No!

If the shit sticks, then we put nice paint on it

Fucking red dot motherfucker (Ben and his failing specs)

You know what we don’t do often..kill each others builds. Kill them and reschedule for later. Mwahaha ha ha.

This build is going to be so rad...(5mins later)...Ok this is not going to pass..I can feel it in my waters!

Can i do that in a digital way or do i have to move my meaty body downstairs to find him?

All the donkeys have be out the gate by sundown

God, imagine if you could patent mathematical solutions

actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you can in the states "no, you can't use a laplace transform, you haven't got the rights, you have to use a less accurate transform on your matrices"
ooooo a boolean that's phrased in the negative, my favourite for code review destruction!

Fuck the police i'll call the object here

Web RTC - its super easy, all you have to do is..probably some hard stuff

I want to go to that conference so I can start arguments with dickheads about semicolons. Just for fun.

This this is not the same as that this.

Can’t come to work I can’t find any clothes. It’s best for everyone if I just don’t come in. ...2 hours later... Yeah my clothes were just in the other room and i couldn’t be fucked moving

(OH about bad bug reports) - you know when they are all like oh joogly joogly doesn’t doodle doodle and it should wobbly doodle you know? and im all like fuck i don’t know any of that shit you are talking about.

Him: "I don’t like it, it’s against REST convention its so 2006 that my eyes are bleeding. As a privileged white male i feel entitled to complain about this." Me: "you. were. eleven in 2006

Source: Kellective Github

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

* How I solve a problem*

"Okay, it seems to be interesting, OK think solve it generally"

*Solved the problem manually

"Okay pseudo code is /do this and that/ break it and write Algo.
Seems like it will work,
Making all sense
Okay let's code"

*Wrote in IDE

" Hmm compile and execute"

*Expected output : Hey you!
*Actual output : F you!
Me: What the hell

"Uhh! Just gonna apply brute force"

*Somehow got the actual output = expected output

"I knew, it gonna solve it but how it worked?"

*Thinking
*Thinking....
*Thinking and it's 2 am

"Oh! I'm done, I'm going to sleep"

*4 am, while lucid dreaming

"That's how that thing worked, I got it"

*Relieved
*Next day using the logic dreamt of
*No matter how much surreal it is
*It didn't work

Me : F U!!!
..
..
...
(to be continued)

I'm so tired yo... I'm on 2 startups, one is mine the other some dude I'm working with. Both sites built in PHP. Another side gig slack bot thing in Node JS. And then 2 day time jobs in which I'm deciding which one to quit out of... 🫠😵💀

I just want to share this:

When I start working at my last job, I have little idea of what a unit test was.

My boss on one meeting said that unit testing will be mandatory (wich is ok and umderstandable).

Almost a *year* after that, no one still care about them. I see myself doing them the best I can, but I saw things like wrap the assertion line with "try / catch" to lie to the coverage and unit test percentage. Or in other cases directly uploading *manually* the code on the server without test at all.

And then, as the only developer who do the unit test ok I have to do the missing ones and repair the fake ones.

Then when something explodes the question all the managers love to ask "Did we had the testing?"

At least I quit... that job was some crazy shit, this is just one story of many.

Like that other time that my co-workers did not understand why I needed to do POJOs on an android app because the big bad JSON that the app used was working fine....

As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:

FUCK REACT!

It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"

Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.

Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)

And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.

And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.

In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...

I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.

They must be a MESS to maintain.

For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?

Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.

Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.

If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)

Step 1. Learn to code .
Step 2. Exchange code for money.
Step 3. Exchange money for car, soap & a clean shirt.
Step 4. Profit.
[GOTO: Step #1]

Lol. OK on a serious note coding improved my love life, it drastically reduced the frequency of dates - but dramatically improved the quality and duration of my relationships.
I used to believe that anyone/thing had the potential to be great - and (like me) all they needed was a little time to seize an opportunity.
This essentially meant there were no deal breakers and I spent a lot of time giving people benefit of the doubt and investing a lot of time & effort supporting and trying to build on aspirations that would turn out to simply be fantasies I was indulging.

I still idealistically believe that everything/one has infinite potential - only now I know which problems are worth solving, which are purely for fun or a thought experiment and which should immediately be thrown out and refactored.

All the ambition in the world is void without drive.

For fuck sake I get that people like python but not everyone is going to use it!

Just want a few articles or tutorials on interpreters and would you fucking look at that, it's all just in fucking python using external libraries...

Then I purchased a couple Linux and Raspberry pi magazines just to have a gander at some of the code examples and what do you think every single piece of code is? C? C++? Vala? Nope, fucking python!

I will eventually finish learning what I can about python but there are other languages that exist that isnt fucking python, give us some C, C# or even bloody JavaScript... Please

Ok rant about python over, back to my hole

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

Dev: "I've pushed some code. Give it a code review."
Me: "ok, i'll do it"
<<fast forward>>
Me: "Sounds good to me. Only thing, I wouldn't have gone for all those renames because that was not part of the request, maybe we can discuss ...."
Dev: "I like those names and besides, it's already deployed in production"
Me: " :| .... what's the purpose of a code review when you push straight into production ?

Project in college, many moons ago.

Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.

3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.

The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.

The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”

Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.

## Week 1

We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.

He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...

## Week 2

We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.

After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.

Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.

Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...

“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”

And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.

## Week 3

We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.

Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.

You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.

## Night before

We say fuck it and do the thing.

In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.

In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.

## The day of

Partner 3 comes into class and says this...

“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)

Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.

“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”

He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.

We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.

Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.

He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.

The teacher ask him to stay after class.

## Result

We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).

Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.

Bonus Content:

That same asshat above once said this to me...

“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”

Yes, he wrote all code like this...

const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}

Fuck that guy🖕🏽

porra; caralho; toma no cu.

this fucking shit xamarin. I wish the ass who programed the xamarin vs2017 integration to go fuck off.

srsly, I just want to fucking code this fucking fucker VS2017 keep shitting all around me

first I was gonna install it. didn't install because no memory left. fair enough, my fault there.

cleaned 35 gbs.

finish installing VS, with xamarin. FIRST GOD DAMN TIME I create fucking project, 2 fucking errors and 3 warnings. I DIDN'T EVEN TYPE A COMMA.

ok, tried fucking it. it seems to be conflict between version of Android and xamarin forms. fucker you it shouldn't be like this. anyway.

tried downloading the updated Android version.

it failed at 80%! what error you ask? missing fucking space ok, fuck that thing is huge, ok, my fault again. uninstalled all programs I was not using, all projects I'm not current working on. more fucking 30GB free. tried again. ANDROID IS TOO FUVKING HUGE CAN'T INSTALL IN 30GB!!!

Ok. instead of updating android, gonna downgrade xamarin, can't downgrade. ok gonna remove and install an early version.

unistalled. CAN'T FIND XAMARIN DLLS.

I was like, fuck this project, gonna start a new one. ok, all seems fine, for some weird reason. Except no. I try adding a new page, ops, APPARENTLY VS2017 CAN'T LOAD A GODDAMN .XAML

Ok, I can create a .cs page. done, except now I get a fucking timeout error. fuck.

I search the internet for a workaround, see a guy saying I could manually add a .xaml + .cs by creating this files and then adding them to the proj file.

did it. I go again, everything seems fine. but now I can't freaking reference the damn page.

I'm fucking losing my mind here.

In the mean time I have to turn in this project at the end of the week AND I CAN'T FUCKING OPEN THE GOD DAMN FREKING PROJECT PROPERLY!

FUCK. MY. LIFE.
FUCK XAMARIM AS WELL
FUCK VISUAL STUDIO
FUCK MICROSOFT
FUCK THAT DAMN SSD
FUCK THAT BOSS WHO THINK THAT A 128GB SSD IS ENOUGH
FUCK IT ALL...

I'm finally writing unit tests consistently thanks to a simple file organization decision.

I'm not doing pure TDD, but at least I'm writing the tests immediately after writing a module, and I make sure they run ok.

What I'm doing is Instead of putting the test files in a "tests" dir at the root of the project, I have the tests right next to the source code.

So if I have a dog.x file, I also have a dog.test.x file next to it.

I'm not inventing gunpowder here. I've seen several people do this.
But it's something that is not generally made a default or advised to do.
Like I said; test frameworks in general go with the classic "tests" dir.

But for me this is day and night in whether I write the tests or not.

Which makes sense. Imagine the classic scenario of the "tests" dir, and you just created a file deep into a hierarchy, let's say src/lib/console/windows/dog.x

This means that if you want to write tests for that, you need to make sure the hierarchy tests/lib/console/windows/dog.test.x exists

If the test file already exists, but you want to access both files, you need to traverse deep for each.

Also, it's actually harder to keep track which files have unit tests and which do not.

Meanwhile, if the test files are next to the source, all these problems disappear.

That doesn't mean there are no other challenges with testing, like testing untestable things, like system calls or http requests, but there are ways to deal with that.

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

While I was working on a university project with my team, a teammate asked me why the window of the program in my screen was bigger than in his. I simply answered him that his screen was a FullHD one that had a 1920x1080 resolution, while mine had a lower resolution, and he was like "Noo! This isn't a fullhd screen, it's not so sharp".
So I showed him the "1920x1080" sticker right below his screen, and him again "Yeah, it could have this resolution but definitely it's not a FullHD screen".
- Ok, as you say...

The same guy two days ago was talking about creating a GUI in C.
I told him that C was the wrong language to build programs with a GUI, although there's some very old libs that allow you to do that in 16bit.
And him again: "Ok but Linux (distros) do that and the UIs are great!"
- Do you think that all the fucking Ubuntu/Mint/any distro code is written in C??

The funny thing is the arrogance with which he says all these bullshits.

P. S. We are attending the 3rd year of Computer Engineering.

So lets start here, as i have been preparing myself for a while for that rant. I have been putting it off for a while, but today I had enough.
Fuck react-native and fuck facebook react-native team. Bunch of lazy incompetent twats.
The all amazing framework that suppose to be speed up your development process, since you don't have to compile your code after each change. SO FUCKING WHAT if the god damned framework is so fucking buggy and so fucking shit that you constantly have to fix build, dependancies etc issues. Every day since I work on this project that is using react-native I have to deal with some of the react fucked up behaviour. You got an issue ? don't worry google it just to find out that 100 other people had the same issue. Scroll through down the bottom of the page just to find out that facebook devs have closed the issue as resolved (without fucking fixing it) because there wasnt recent replies to the post. Are you fucking kidding me? It's ok thou, create a new issue just to get an automatic reply from the bot that locks the thread and keeps it locked till you update your React-native version to the newest one. You do that and guess fucking what? Their newest version fucks up remote debugging on iOS(fucking android been broke for over a year) so say good bye to debugging your js code. Documentation is fucking trash. You found a nice function like autoCaptialise on your text input? Great! Ah wait, its not fucking working, what is wrong? You google this just to fucking found out it, function never worked on android, so why the fuck you still have it exposed and still have it in your docs? You want to add package? So fucking ez, just type npm install <name of the package>. Ha! fuck you, you still have to go and add them fucking manually in gradle in android and in pod in xcode, because obviously react-native is a one big fucking bullshit. Oh and a scroll view is a fucking glorious highlight of that framework, try add some styling to it, you gonna have loads of fun. Fuck react-native. And fuck the fucking idiot who convinced my boss that framework is so fucking great and now I have to work on this shit. Sincerely Xamarin Developer.

This customer's dev is going to be the end of me. I had to explain to him why it doesn't make any sense to return a value after throwing an exception.

In a function that was supposed to insert a record amd return its id, in the error handling code:

catch(Exception ex) {
//logs the exception
throw ex;
return - 999; //this code will NEVER be reached, and why the f.... - 999?
}
The customer wants us to develop the project together, but he won't listen and always write whatever he wants. Some might be differences in taste. Like me preferring
if(condition) {
return a;
}
return b;

And him preferring :

Foo result = null;
if(condition) {
result = a;
} else {
result = b;
}
return result;

Ok, that I can accept. But things like the one I'm ranting about... I wont.

I'm starting to wonder what was he doing during his "9 years of coding experience"

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏