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Search - "i thought i could code"
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The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).
I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.
I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.
He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.
But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.
Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.
But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.
So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.
I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.
We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.
Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.
That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.
Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.
1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out
So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.
I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:
Never underestimate the power of friendship.21 -
I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.
The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.
We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.
Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.
Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.8 -
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).24 -
Scene: Senior developer left, 3 Junior devs(including me) are now loaded with work.
*Intern asks for help*
JuniorDev1: I have 2 projects of which i'm the lead on one. I don't have time to help anyone.
JD2: 2 projects as well dude, speak to me after work, much easier then.
Me: 3 projects, lead on two. Sure how can i help you.
Took less than 5 minutes to help the intern.
2 hours Later. Check in meeting
PM: Our Junior devs are really busy and can't always help you guys. JD1 are you overloaded?
JD1: Yes, is their anyway we can split the one projects work?
PM: Sure. JD2 are you overloaded?
JD2: Not really, but i agree on splitting the projects between the three of us.
Me: *Are these fuckers serious? i have three projects, they have 2 and they wanna give me more work because they are overloaded and don't know how to manage their time*
PM: Ok cool, i'll update it. CooCooK4Choo, i see you building your own game during lunch time. You definitely not overloaded.
Me: Actually! what i do in my lunch time is my own personal work because it's the only time i have to work on personal projects. I actually do feel overloaded with the 3 projects and now more work from them, could we split the work load evenly please.
PM: I thought you said you could handle the 3 projects?
Me: I can, i have been, but with more work coming my way i don't think i'll be able to.
PM: Unfortunately i need the other Junior Devs on demand, so i won't be able to split the work load evenly.
Me: On demand for what? Why not let the interns help?
PM: In case i need their help. The interns are helping the other Junior Devs with things that don't require too much out of them.
Me: *This FUCKEN BITCH!* Cool, I'm done with the 1 project, expect the business rules at the end of the day. I'll see if i can get the other 2 near done by Friday so i can have time to look over the code of the new projects that i'll be splitting with the other Junior Devs.
PM: Cool, glad we all on the same page.
You know what? FUCK this stupid shit of favoring people in the FUCKEN work place.
This is my first full-time job ever, I've been here for a full year today and i can honestly say these people are just giant children with money. I should know, out of work i am a giant child, but from 8:00 - 16:00 i'm a FUCKEN adult.17 -
So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!
It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"
Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.
My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.
I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.
Then I started to experiment more and more.
After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!
From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.
Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!
I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.
Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?
First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.
Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.
Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!
I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.
Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!
Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.
Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.
Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!
It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).20 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.
Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...
Fuck me if some students are horrendous!
To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.
One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.
The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).
But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".
He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.
The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.
This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.
About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".
The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.
Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"
I'm done.
"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"
"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"
"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."
The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."22 -
Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!7 -
Developed an android app for the client. It was going great. Prototype for the initial (and static) content to show to the client was on the way. All until...
*goes back in time to when we were developing the prototype*
The asshole boss: "Wow this is good, just remove the login after the splash screen. Redirect it to the dashboard immediately."
Me: "What? Why?"
TAB: "He (the CEO of our company) said that the client doesn't need to see the login."
Me: "Well, alright." (Orders are orders, better remove it)
*A few days later, we present the prototype to the CEO. He'll be the one talking to the client. TAB isn't in this meeting.*
CEO: "Where is the login screen?"
Me: *dumbfounded and confused, in silence, and pressure rising*
The Good Boss: *whispers* "Where is the login screen? I thought I told you guys it should be there."
Me: *whispers* "TAB told us to remove it."
TGB: *Looks toward CEO* "TAB told us to remove it."
CEO: "Ugh. TAB is sick."
A little giggle. Nonetheless the meeting continued. He was displeased. I was a little guilty. The login screen's code was already there. Just couldn't show it since the app doesn't redirect there anymore.
*A discussion after the meeting*
TGB: "Why'd you guys remove the login?"
Me: "You and TAB had a meeting with the CEO the other day. After the discussion TAB went to us and told us to change it."
TGB: "But the CEO said no such thing! Anyway, let's go back to the office and straighten this out tomorrow."
*The next day, TAB was in the office*
TGB: *Chatting on messenger with me* "He is completely denying it."
Me: "WHAT?"
TGB: "He said he never told you guys anything. And he is persistent. I kept telling him it was his fault, but he denies all of it. He never approached you guys to change anything."
Me: "Well yeah. I guess we magically thought to ourselves and said, 'Hey, let's remove the login screen for fun. Let's show them less content because that's how we please our clients!' -_-"
Seriously, what kind of assholefuckery is this. This shit is a whole new level. I am so TRIGGERED.
I don't really care that the meeting didn't go as planned. Just MAN UP AND ADMIT YOUR MISTAKE YOU FILTHY SON OF A GOOSE. Never listening to this asshole again. Thought he could be trusted. I will always ask my good boss next time.18 -
Swift, oh my god, why do you have to be like this?
I'm looking to write a simple for loop like this one in java
for(int i = 5; i > 0; i--) {
// do shit
}
Thats it, simple, go from 5 to 1 (inclusive), I saw that to iterate over a range in a for loop (increasing ordeR) I can do this
for i in 0...5 {
// do shit.
}
So I thought maybe I could do this to go in reverse (which seems logical when you think about it doesn't it?)
for i in 5..<0 {
// do shit
}
But no, this compiles FINE (THIS IS THE FUCKING KICKER IT COMPILES), alright, when you the code runs you get a fucking exception that crashes the mother fucking application, and you know what the problem is?? This dogshit, shitStain of a language doesn't like it when integer that the for loop starts with is larger than the integer that the for loop ends with MOTHERFUCKER ATLEAST TELL ME THAT AT COMPILE TIME AS A MOTHERFUCKING WARNING YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!
Alright *deep breathing*, now we can't just be stuck on this raging, we're developers need to move forward, so I google this, "Swift for loop in reverse" fair enough I get a straight forward answer that tells me to use the `stride` functionality. The relevant code for it
for i in stride(from:5 to:1 by:-1) {
// do shit
}
Wow looks fine and simple right?? (looks like god damn any other language if you ask me, no innovations here piece of shit apple!) WRONG BITCHES !!! In the latest version of Swift THE FUCKING DEVELOPERS DECIDED TO REMOVE STRIDE ALTOGETHER, WITHOUT ADDING IN A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR THAT SHIT!
Alright NOW IM FUCKING MAD, I got rage on stackoverflow chat, a guy who's been working on ios for quite a while comes up n says and I quote
"I can sort of figure it out, but besides that, iterating in reverse is uncommon enough that it probably hasn't crossed anyone's mind."
Now hope you guys understand my frustration, and send me cookies to calm me down.
Thank you for listening to me !27 -
So I visited my aunt's house a few days back.
They heard I write code (read: Google and copy-paste from Stack Overflow), and wanted me to help repair their computers.
Saw my cousin playing Battlefield 4 at sub-20 fps with a GTX 750 Ti on the lowest settings. His fucking CPU fan was bust, and judging by the amount of dust in his system, I literally thought he was cramming dust in there on purpose.
After a heavy dusting, another stick of RAM (4GB -> 12GB), a new heatsink (CoolerMaster T400i), and a fresh copy of Windows 10 (along with Office, etc.), he could play games at 60+ fps again.
What do I get? Not even a fucking thank you. Just a "you done yet? I want to play video games."
I mean... Gee. Your cousin flew all the way to a new continent, spent his precious vacation time helping you out, and all he gets is a cold-ass shoulder.
Even my fucking ex gave me more than that.16 -
Started being a Teaching Assistant for Intro to Programming at the uni I study at a while ago and, although it's not entirely my piece of cake, here are some "highlights":
* students were asked to use functions, so someone was ingenious (laughed my ass off for this one):
def all_lines(input):
all_lines =input
return all_lines
* "you need to use functions" part 2
*moves the whole code from main to a function*
* for Math-related coding assignments, someone was always reading the input as a string and parsing it, instead of reading it as numbers, and was incredibly surprised that he can do the latter "I always thought you can't read numbers! Technology has gone so far!"
* for an assignment requiring a class with 3 private variables, someone actually declared each variable needed as a vector and was handling all these 3 vectors as 3D matrices
* because the lecturer specified that the length of the program does not matter, as long as it does its job and is well-written, someone wrote a 100-lines program on one single line
* someone was spamming me with emails to tell me that the grade I gave them was unfair (on the reason that it was directly crashing when run), because it was running on their machine (they included pictures), but was not running on mine, because "my Python version was expired". They sent at least 20 emails in less than 2h
* "But if it works, why do I still have to make it look better and more understandable?"
* "can't we assume the input is always going to be correct? Who'd want to type in garbage?"
* *writes 10 if-statements that could be basically replaced by one for-loop*
"okay, here, you can use a for-loop"
*writes the for loop, includes all the if-statements from before, one for each of the 10 values the for-loop variable gets*
* this picture
N.B.: depending on how many others I remember, I may include them in the comments afterwards19 -
"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.16 -
Her diary:
Tonight I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a nice restaurant for dinner. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at a fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it. Conversation wasn’t flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn’t say much. I asked him what was wrong. He said, "Nothing". I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn’t upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that i loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior, I can’t explain why he didn’t say, "I love you too". When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent. Finally, with silence around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep - I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster :(
His diary:
My code is broken, can’t figure out why.3 -
!rant
Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.
11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.
You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.
That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.
Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.
Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.
There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.
In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.
Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.
And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.
I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.
Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !
Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life9 -
In my previous company, I used to work for a client company which had a terrible website. It was about financial data and people would have to wait too long before the page loaded because there was a freaking 1.2 megs of minified, compressed JS file that needed to load before you could do anything.
Everyone knew that was a pain in the ass and nobody wanted to touch spaghetti code and mess up something they didn't know.
I wanted to however take a shot at it. So an architect from client side and I discussed how we were gonna go about it and how we were gonna find the stuff that needed to load on page load and stuff that could be loaded later.
So we plan for it. We broke everything down from a globals polluting JS, found out the variables and functions that needed to run during first load by literally putting a console statement for each function and finally came up with two bundles.
The primary bundle was 120kb and would during first load and then every module would call it's own secondary bundle when the user interacted with it.
In the process, we removed half a meg of JS and the site became blazing fast.
I did it with a team of two members who, my manager thought were useless, learned a ton of stuff, setup proper process for the transition.
When the client didn't appreciate the amount of brain and effort we had put into it, these two members came forward to tell the client to acknowledge my effort and attributed the success of it to me.
I was totally moved. There was so much respect that I didnt care what anybody else thought. I was just so happy to work with those two humans.
When i left the company, i gifted them stuff they always talked about or wanted. :) Feels good.2 -
[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]
Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.
That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.
If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!6 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).
So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.
I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.
Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.
I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.21 -
I really hate this company.
The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.
Fuck him.
And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.
Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.
and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.
Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.
But I digress.
I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.
just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.
'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.rant it's a cool day at 96f/35c root has problems and fan the flames as your blazes burn root should see a shrink desert kerosene asshole boss when you fall i'll take my turn15 -
(Interview for sde-3 position)
(continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/2132431/... )
Interviewer - *opens laptop. Gives a question.* solve this.
Me - *a bit surprised that such questions were being asked on a sde-3 level*
this is the 4th or 5th question from geeksforgeeks, isn't it? I know the answer to this. Do u still want me to solve it?
Interviewer - *not believing me* Yes
Me - okay. Well this *writing down the original solution mentioned on the site* is the verbatim code mentioned on the website, with complexity O(n^2).
However I feel this is not the optimal solution. Let me write a better solution.
*I provide a better solution*
This has a complexity of O(n log n) . What do you think?
Interviewer - Nope. This could be a lot better.
Me - okay. Let me see. Did some minor changes, added some caching (obviously this will have no effect on the base algorithm) etc
How about now?
Interviewer - nope. Still not good.
Me - okay. Can you tell me how to improve it?
Interviewer - no we are not allowed to solve problems for you. It is not our interview, it is yours.
Me - that makes no sense. Interviews are a two way street. I'd very much like to know the optimal answer to this.
Interviewer - okay
*copies down the answer from geeksforgeeks*
This is good
Me - *at first I thought this was a prank or something. *
I just mentioned this answer here.
Then I spent the next 10 minutes providing a BETTER solution.
May I know how yours is better?
Interviewer - this solution has 2-3 loops. Yours has a function calling itself.
Me - that's called divide and conquer using recursion mf!
Anyways let's take an example and do a dry run.
Interviewer - okay
*we do dry run*
Interviewer - oh yes. Yours ran faster. But it will run fast only sometimes.
Me - yes. Each time the algorithm rolls a dice to decide if it should run fast or slow. You have one goddamn awesome weed dealer man.
I got to go. Thank you for meeting me.14 -
I'm convinced code addiction is a real problem and can lead to mental illness.
Dev: "Thanks for helping me with the splunk API. Already spent two weeks and was spinning my wheels."
Me: "I sent you the example over a month ago, I guess you could have used it to save time."
Dev: "I didn't understand it. I tried getting help from NetworkAdmin-Dan, SystemAdmin-Jake, they didn't understand what you sent me either."
Me: "I thought it was pretty simple. Pass it a query, get results back. That's it"
Dev: "The results were not in a standard JSON format. I was so confused."
Me: "Yea, it's sort-of JSON. Splunk streams the result as individual JSON records. You only have to deserialize each record into your object. I sent you the code sample."
Dev: "Your code didn't work. Dan and Jake were confused too. The data I have to process uses a very different result set. I guess I could have used it if you wrote the class more generically and had unit tests."
<oh frack...he's been going behind my back and telling people smack about my code again>
Me: "My code wouldn't have worked for you, because I'm serializing the objects I need and I do have unit tests, but they are only for the internal logic."
Dev:"I don't know, it confused me. Once I figured out the JSON problem and wrote unit tests, I really started to make progress. I used a tuple for this ... functional parameters for that...added a custom event for ... Took me a few weeks, but it's all covered by unit tests."
Me: "Wow. The way you explained the project was; get data from splunk and populate data in SQLServer. With the code I sent you, sounded like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Oooh nooo...its waaay more complicated than that. I have this very complex splunk query, which I don't understand, and then I have to perform all this parsing, update a database...which I have no idea how it works. Its really...really complicated."
Me: "The splunk query returns what..4 fields...and DBA-Joe provided the upsert stored procedure..sounds like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Maybe for you...we're all not super geniuses that crank out code. I hope to be at your level some day."
<frack you ... condescending a-hole ...you've got the same seniority here as I do>
Me: "No seriously, the code I sent would have got you 90% done. Write your deserializer for those 4 fields, execute the stored procedure, and call it a day. I don't think the effort justifies the outcome. Isn't the data for a report they'll only run every few months?"
Dev: "Yea, but Mgr-Nick wanted unit tests and I have to follow orders. I tried to explain the situation, but you know how he is."
<fracking liar..Nick doesn't know the difference between a unit test and breathalyzer test. I know exactly what you told Nick>
Dev: "Thanks again for your help. Gotta get back to it. I put a due date of April for this project and time's running out."
APRIL?!! Good Lord he's going to drag this intern-level project for another month!
After he left, I dug around and found the splunk query, the upsert stored proc, and yep, in about 15 minutes I was done.1 -
Brother of my friend came to me and asked me to teach him C as it was most important lesson in high school CS. I agreed and started with data types, conditional statements, loops and others that were mostly exam oriented. He was doing good. Then I thought of teaching him a life lesson and introduced him to pointers(questions about pointers are very rare in exams). As soon as I started the pointers, things got pretty bored and he went off topic and started talking about a girl he has crush on and told he wanted to know when her birthday was so that he could gift her something to be ahead of the crowd trying to impress her. I thought to help him out, afterall he's like my younger brother and told him I can help. Result of his previous exam were out then, providing symbol number on Examination Board's website would do the trick because it would return full data of students result which had birthday in it. I modified my previous script to fetch data of his school's result and pass the data to a file. They're together since last few months. He reminds me time to time that my code is what got them together.8
-
"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."
YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!2 -
So, I was participating in a competition, but little did I know that you could only participate in pairs. Seeing that a lot of famous indie devs were participating I was extremely hyped. But since it seemed like I was the only idiot who didn't have a partner I felt like kicking myself. Then a guy about whom I had never heard of before, probably a newbie, comes out of the blue and asks me to be his partner. Since I had no choice, I reluctantly agreed to pair up with him. The rules of the competition were to create a game based on a particular theme in a period of 1 week. To get started, I asked him about his skills as it would be better to know what our strengths and weaknesses were. He said that he was good at art and proceeded to show me some of his "previous works". I was genuinely impressed. Honestly speaking his drawing seemed a bit off but was but for a newbie, it was good. So we decided that he would take care of the art and I would code, create some basic music (nothing too fancy because of the lack of time) and if time permits, refine his art(correcting ratios, colour combinations, shading, etc.). On the first day, he would like to work in privacy and would show only the finished products to me. It seemed a bit fishy, but hey, I am all up for respecting the wishes of fellow team members.
So all was going well, or so I thought, till on the fifth day the guy confesses that he didn't get shit done. Apparently, his "previous works" were random stuff taken from the great land of internet and that he had to leave town the next day. He just wanted to "experience the life of a game developer" and "meant no harm". I flipped out, half lectured half screamed at him then asked him to get the fuck out which happened to be the only fucking thing that he was able to do correctly. I thought for an hour or so, then contacted the staff and informed them about my situation. They said that if I was okay with the handicap, I may continue. I then pulled three all nighters with about 3 hours of sleep (that too in parts of about 1 hour) everyday and was barely able to submit my game on time.
I secured the fifth place, which was pretty good if I may say so myself, but it an important lesson in my life that taught me to never trust anyone blindly.4 -
When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.
Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".
What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.
Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.
Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.
I did this for 4 months.
The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.
So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.
I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.
In the end:
- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.
- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job
- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.
So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.
3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.2 -
!Story
The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.
I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.
They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...
And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.
So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.
I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.
After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.
I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.
So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.
Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.
So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.
I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.
Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.
We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.
"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"
I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.
My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.
If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.
Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.
Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.9 -
You know the story about Battlefront 2? How long it takes to farm points to unlock those cool characters like Darth Vader etc? Yeah, it takes some time. Time that I necessarily don’t want to spend on mindless playing. I thought I’d try to beat the system by building this thing that would play the game for me by moving and jumping every few seconds.
I already have the code ready and now I just need to build the physical thing that will actually interact with the controller.
I am using an Arduino Uno with two micro servos.
Honestly I just want to see if I could build it, I’m not sure I will actually use it (you barely get any points if you’re not killing people anyway).
I’ll keep you posted with the result!13 -
Long story short, I'm unofficially the hacker at our office... Story time!
So I was hired three months ago to work for my current company, and after the three weeks of training I got assigned a project with an architect (who only works on the project very occasionally). I was tasked with revamping and implementing new features for an existing API, some of the code dated back to 2013. (important, keep this in mind)
So at one point I was testing the existing endpoints, because part of the project was automating tests using postman, and I saw something sketchy. So very sketchy. The method I was looking at took a POJO as an argument, extracted the ID of the user from it, looked the user up, and then updated the info of the looked up user with the POJO. So I tried sending a JSON with the info of my user, but the ID of another user. And voila, I overwrote his data.
Once I reported this (which took a while to be taken seriously because I was so new) I found out that this might be useful for sysadmins to have, so it wasn't completely horrible. However, the endpoint required no Auth to use. An anonymous curl request could overwrite any users data.
As this mess unfolded and we notified the higher ups, another architect jumped in to fix the mess and we found that you could also fetch the data of any user by knowing his ID, and overwrite his credit/debit cards. And well, the ID of the users were alphanumerical strings, which I thought would make it harder to abuse, but then realized all the IDs were sequentially generated... Again, these endpoints required no authentication.
So anyways. Panic ensued, systems people at HQ had to work that weekend, two hot fixes had to be delivered, and now they think I'm a hacker... I did go on to discover some other vulnerabilities, but nothing major.
It still amsues me they think I'm a hacker 😂😂 when I know about as much about hacking as the next guy at the office, but anyways, makes for a good story and I laugh every time I hear them call me a hacker. The whole thing was pretty amusing, they supposedly have security audits and QA, but for five years, these massive security holes went undetected... And our client is a massive company in my country... So, let's hope no one found it before I did.6 -
If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.
I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.
I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.
SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."
Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"
SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"
Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.
SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."
We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"
SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."
Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."
He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.
So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.
You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.9 -
So last year in highschool, everybody had to make a website project with stores and stuff. Everybody was in groups and you could plan your time on you own, working in class or at home.
So my friend spent hours at home designing his website for his group, and to be honest, it looked amazing.
There was only one problem, all files were located on a server which was accessible by all groups without the teacher even being able to know who had accessed which file.
There was this one group which just spent their time in class playing stupid browser games, 3 people in a group, one of them looking at kpop and puppy's for what seemed like to be hours at a time.
Well to get to the point, about 1-2 days before deadline, they noticed they hadn't done shit.
SO THOSE FUCKING BASTARDS JUST COPIED ALL THE FUCKING CODE MY FRIEND HAD MADE.
AT PRESENTATION TIME THEIR "PROJECT" CAME UP FIRST AND MY FRIEND WAS TO ME LIKE "OH NO THOSE FUCKERS DIDN'T JUST COPY MY WHOLE WEBSITE".
ANYWAYS, THEY CLAIMED MY FRIEND HAD COPIED THEM AND GOT AWAY WITH IT!!! (They got an A on the Project, my friend got a C because the teacher thought he copy pasted the design.)
I spoke to diz dude who copied the code, we knew who it was, because the others in the group probably dont even know what the copy and paste keys were.
He laughed at me and said, "C'mon, it's not a big deal.."
IF YOU ARE TOO INCOMPETENT TO WRITE A SINGLE CODE OF LINE, THEN DONT FUCKING STEAL SHIT FROM OTHERS WHO PUT IN HOURS OF WORK, AND MESS UP THEIR GRADE. TAKE YOUR FUCKING F AND LEAVE THE CLASS!!!12 -
My first dev job was to code a minecraft plugin that was so simple but I made it sound super hard. The guy who bought it from me thought I was some professinal plugin maker so he paid me 100 swedish kronor for a plugin he could get for free ☺️9
-
This one project at my study.
We always had to do quite some documentation, even some in a way that works the opposite of how my brain works.
That's all fine if you can agree on doing it differently.
Had this teacher who valued documentation above anything else. The project was 10 weeks, after 9 weeks my documentation got approved (yes, not a single line of code yet) and I could finally program for the remaining 5 days.
Still had quite some bugs at say number five, the day of presentation.
I imagined that'd be okay since I only had 4 full days instead of the 5-8 weeks everyone else had.
Every bug was noted and the application was "unstable" and "not nearly good enough".
At that moment I thought like "if this is the dev life, I'm out of here".7 -
We had a client visit our PH office to "hang out" and see the progress in this educational type game we were building for their private school (apparently, it's the one that Obama's kids went to).
Manager oversold the progress and actually guaranteed some features that we were still working on and estimated to finish in the next 3 sprints (2 week intervals).
Client was due to be in the office in 2 days.
PM pushes back and says we need to manage client expectations properly.
CEO got wind and sat the dev team down. Dev lead, two seniors, and junior me. He sat us down and asked us what we think.
Lead says we can do it.
Now to be fair, I know this guy to be very competent and an INCREDIBLE programmer. He is the person I consider to be the first real mentor I ever had but I really thought we were fucked here.
Next day and half was hell--for me, at least and I really couldn't see how this was all possible.
But then the fucker came through. This beautiful, majestic meganerd and the two other guys shat out 6 weeks of code in ~30 hours.
And the crazy part was it was all working. Bugs were caught in the next few days for sure, but the demo went flawlessly.
I never doubted this guy again.
Years later, I'd meet up with him and would talk fondly about those days and all he could say was "I don't really remember". He remembers the project and that we had a demo but he couldn't remember anything around those days.
Two of the most stressful days of my life and to him it was a fucking Wednesday. What a fucking champ.4 -
In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.
System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.
Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.
And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!
The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.
Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).
This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"
Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.1 -
POSTMORTEM
"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.
IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"
As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"
I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths
@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.
Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.
What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.
This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?
So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.
Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.
For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.
So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)
x = a/p
y = b/p
1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.
2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.
3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.
Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.
Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.
Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.
I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.
The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus
while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i
Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.38 -
An application based on a single MySQL stored procedure that contained all the application business logic inside of it (plus a poor webapp that simply called it). The stored procedure had 97 (yes, NINETY SEVEN) parameters... and about half of them were boolean flag used for enabling/disabling another parameter. I think that Uncle Bob could follow you holding an AK-47 if he saw that. The saddest part is that the shit was written by a guy having a PhD in computer science, and he knew that was bad, but the boss asked him to do it in that way. The guy left the company before I joined it and I had to maintain that crap. Guys, the first time I saw it I thought that should be a joke. Code generated by decompilers was easier to read, maybe even Brainfuck. I tried complaining with the boss but she said that the system was wonderful and very efficient. This was one of the reasons I moved to another company after some months.3
-
As a German developer living in Germany, I am used to write my code completely in English. In all of my former companies that was also the norm. In one company, we even talked completely in English with each other to a point where even if only German people where in a room, they would default to English at one point in a conversation because it became second nature to us.
(That company was very international and we had a lot of people from all over the world working there.)
Now, I work at a new German company that focuses on the German market. And for some reason I failed to ask them:
Do you write your code in English?
Because that's the norm, isn't it!? I just assumed it to be the case.
Nope! This time it is a mess of German and English term intermixing in glorious abysmal ways I never thought possible.
Sometimes we translate terms, sometimes we don't. So you have to wrap your mind around collections of words that COULD mean the same thing unless they don't. Best case, you have two words for the same thing, but I've seen up to five words (or abbreviations) to describe one business entity. Madness.
And don't get me started on the plurals. In English, it's almost exclusively: add an `s`.
In German, the singular and plural can be the same (e.g. all nouns ending with `-er`) so tough luck determining if you are on an object or an array of objects. (Weak typing language in use does not help either but that's an entirely different rant.)27 -
i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.
when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"
he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.
i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.
our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.
in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.
after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.
i never received an apology from anybody involved.5 -
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!undefined web development jsp school assignment not my job fuck up android studio tldr; not getting paid enough for this shit gradle blame backend9 -
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.. :/7 -
End of second week at a new job. Found what I thought was a bug and wanting to impress I fixed it. The dev reviewing my code had just started a week before me so he also had no idea what was going on. It went live Friday afternoon.
Come back Monday morning and turns out I completely broke everything and nobody could use the site all weekend. I thought I was done for sure. Was shitting myself all day waiting for the call.
TURNS OUT NOBODY EVEN NOTICED4 -
Guy I just met: so what do you do?
Me: I'm a developer
Guy: no way! I work for a software company so... (goes on to talk for 10 minutes trying to show off his knowledge of software)
Me: so what do you do there?
Guy: sales
Me: oh...
Just because you work for a software company does not mean you know shit about software. Don't try to build some erroneous common ground with me because you walked by a developer's desk one time, looked at his or her screen, and magically thought you could understand code.9 -
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
So let's talk about these tasks we were assigned. Ms Reliable and Mr DDTW's friend who I just realized I haven't named yet were in charge of programming communications. Ms Enabler and Mr DDTW were in charge of creating the vehicle subclasses for the new variants we were instructed to build. Each one had to handle one variant, and we estimated that both of these would be about the same difficulty (Ms Enabler's one turned out to be a little harder).
I like Ms Enabler, and she's a good friend, although she isn't the best at problem solving and her strengths as a dev lie in her work ethic and the sheer amount of theory she knows and can apply. These just so happened to be the exact opposites of my strengths and weaknesses. Within a few days of having assigned the tasks, she came up to me asking for help, and I agreed. Over the following couple of weeks I'd put in quite a lot of hours reviewing the design with her, and we'd often end up pair programming. It was more work for me, but it was enjoyable and overall we were very efficient.
The other two girls in the group were also absolutely fine this sprint. They simply did the work they had to and let us know on time. Outside of some feedback, requests, bugfixes, and mediating disagreements, I didn't have to do anything with their tasks.
A week and half into the sprint and everybody else has their part almost in an MVP state. As Mr DDTW hadn't said or shown anything yet, I asked if he could push his stuff to the repo (he got stuck with this and needed help btw), and what does he have?
A piece of shit "go to this location" algorithm that did not work and was, once again, 150 lines of if statements. This would not have been such a massive deal if THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS SPRINT HAD BEEN DEDICATED TO MAKING THE CODE DO THIS IN A SENSIBLE WAY. Every single thing that this guy had written was already done. EVERY SINGLE THING. A single function call with the coordinates would let the vehicle do what he wrote but in a way THAT ACTUALLY WORKED AND MADE THE TINIEST BIT OF FUCKING SENSE. He had literally given so few shits about this entire goddamn project that he had absolutely zero clue about what we'd even done last sprint.
After letting this man civilly know through our group chat about his failures, giving him pointers on what's wrong and what he can use and telling him that he should fix it by the end of the week, his response?
"I'll try"
That was it. Fuckass was starting to block us now, and this was the first sign of activity he's given since the sprint started. Ms Enabler had finished her work a fucking week ago, and she actually ASKED when she ran into trouble or thought that something could be improved. Mr DDTW? He never asked for shit, any clarification, any help, and I had let everybody know that I'm open. At least the other two who didn't ask for shit ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He'd been an useless sack of shit for half a semester in three separate projects and the one time he's been assigned something half important that would impact our grades he does this. I would not stand for it.
I let him know all this, still civil (so no insults) but much less kind, capped with "Stop fooling around. Finish this by the of the week." which probably came off as a threat but his shithead kinda had it coming.
He was actually mad. Dropped a huge faux-apologetic spiel in the chat. Why couldn't I just trust him (his code was garbage and he was constantly late without explanation), his work was almost done (it wasn't and if he'd started he'd understand the scope of what he was assigned), that the problem was that I'm a condescending piece of shit (bruh), and was suddenly very interested in doing work. Literally everybody ignored him. What was funny was seeing the first questions and requests for help after that spiel. I obliged and actually answered what he asked.
The end of the week came and went he'd just uploaded more garbage that didn't work. I had foreseen this and, on top of everything else, had been preparing his section of the work done by myself and properly. Thus came a single commit from me with a working version of the entire module, unblocking the entire team. I cannot imagine the sheer hatred for this man at that moment for the commit message to simply be:
"judgement"
And with that, all I got was a threat to report me to the professor for sabotaging his work. The following day our group got an email from the professor, with no explanation, asking for an almost-immediate video conference. Group chat was a shitshow of panic, as nobody knew what was going on. Least of all Mr DDTW.
Once again, I'm approaching the word limit so to be continued in part 3 (hopefully of 3)7 -
A random number generator in my code just gave "0000". I even thought that could be some bug and was investigating. How cool is that?2
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Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.
The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.
1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).
Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).
I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).
What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.
My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.
Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.16 -
When I was in school I had some guys walk up to me and asked:
G: Are you Feeno?
Me: Yes, what's up?
G: We need our FY project on school management system done.
Me: Okay?
G: How much will that cost us?
Me: *confused because I was still a freshman. At that point the only programming language I knew was elementary qbasic. I couldn't even write a hello world program without the help of Google*
So played along because yes we're talking about money here.
Me: It will cost you guys N amount of money (*improvised deep voice*).
G: Okay. Fair price.
* Right there they transferred half the requested amount to me. *
Holy moly! This guys aren't joking around. I don't know shit! They clearly mistook me for a senior student whose first name is Feeno, to me that was a nick referred to me by my friends.
I'm in this one for sure and it's a do or die transaction cus I'm returning no fucking money. I told my friends what had happened and they insisted I return back the money to the students and admit I can't deliver the project they were requesting.
Fuck all of yah! I'm keeping this money. Same afternoon I visited the school library with the intension of writing the code using the help of YouTube tutorials. I didn't find anything useful for qbasic as I thought I could write a full fledged school management system using qbasic.
I was lucky enough to find an existing source code on Codeproject, God bless that Indian guy. The source was in PHP and the tutor gave a step by step guide to setup XAMP and MySQL. I really don't know PHP but I guess source code modification is a natural skill to all programmers as I was able to modify the code to meet the requirements of the students (i.e school name, logo and other minor changes).
Most of what I learnt in programming came from modifying the source of that project. I learnt how to connect a PHP source to a MySQL database, I learnt about functions and their usage, I learnt the basics of HTML, I really learnt a lot and I would say that the speed at which I learnt was proportional to the amount of pressure I received to deliver.
That was how my journey as a full stack developer started. By chance maybe.2 -
FUCKING FUCK! THE TEAM LEAD WANTS ME TO MAKE AN UNNECESSARY UPDATE, AND IN THAT TOO HE WANTS TO IMPLEMENT A HALF ASSED FEATURE. Upon telling him what it takes(which he doesn't understand shit about cuz he's not from webdev background and has the level of experience that I had when I was midway my first webdev book), not to mention that he hasn't even seen the code of the project I've worked upon, which I got from an intern they fired last year cuz of not working and shitting around everywhere in the code(I asked if we could start afresh and he says that it'll take too much time - guess what, it took us two extra weeks already cuz of that and half of our required features can't be implemented cuz the code is beyond any hope), he tells me that "The client won't need this feature, but we're thinking of more and more features to provide (WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK).
Okay, you wanna sell your product; fine. I suggested that if we're letting the client select the time stamp on the initial date, then we should let him select the time stamp on the ending date too, right?
"No, we'll not provide this feature" ARE YOU FUCKING BONKERS?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM WITH YOU?!?!
I'll have to make major breaking changes in the code, for which I'm not the only one working on. Great.
This, coupled with the fact that he speaks unbelievably slow and it's so irritating cuz he repeats himself thrice.
What happens(has already happened), when he'll show this to the seniors, he'll say that this is either unnecessary/will suggest a major change, which WOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH FUCKING BETTER IF TOLD BEFORE I START WITH THE CHANGE, YOU FUCKING CUNTS
I thought this would be fun. Well fuck me.2 -
There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.
The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.
I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.
At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.
I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.
Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.
However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.1 -
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.8 -
So a few years ago when I was getting started with programming, I had this idea to create "Steam but for mods". And just think about it - 13 and a half years old me which knew C# not even for a half of a year wanted to create a fairly sizable project. I wasn't even sure how while () or foreach () loops worked back in the day.
So I've made a post on a polish F1 Challenge '99-'02 game forum about this thing. The guy reached out to me and said: "Hey, I could help you out". This is where all started.
I've got in touch with him via Gadu-Gadu (a polish equivalent of ICQ). So I've sent him the source code... Packed in .ZIP file... By Zippyshare… And just think how BAD this code was. Like for instance, to save games data which you were adding they were stored in text files. The game name was stored in one .txt file. The directory in another. The .exe file name in yet another and so on. Back then I thought that was perfectly fine! I couldn't even make the game to start via this program, because I didn't know about Working Directory).
The guy didn't reply to me anymore.
Of course back then it wasn't embarrassing to me at all, but now when I think about it... -
99% of our server-side code is Python and PHP (legacy applications).
Asked a junior dev to make a small update to a PHP site so we could have it run some cleanup server side. Plenty of existing PHP code to look at and piece something together. Should be 50 lines max.
Did he use the existing PHP code to do this task? Nope. Did he at least use Python? Nope.
Node.js
His response?
"I couldn't figure it out and Node.js seemed to have good support for mongo so I used that instead."
We have 0 lines of server side javascript. Never had node installed. Literally none of the devs use node here. Not only is this completely outside of our tech stack, but he had to take the time to learn Node and JS just because he thought it was easier.
Much would of rather he put in twice as much time to learn the tools of our stack.8 -
About 18 months ago my non-technical Manager of Applications Development asked me to do the technical interviews for a .NET web developer position that needed to be filled. Because I don't believe in white board interviewing (that's another rant), but I do need to see if the prospective dev can actually code, for the initial interview I prepare a couple of coding problems on paper and ask that they solve them using any language or pseudo code they want. I tell them that after they're done we'll discuss their thought process. While they work the other interviewing dev and I silently do our own stuff.
About half way through the first round of technical interviews the aforementioned manager insisted we interview a dev from his previous company. This guy was top notch. Excellent. Will fit right in.
The manager's applicant comes in to interview and after some initial questions about his resume and experience I give him the first programming problem: a straightforward fizzbuzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest). He looked as if the gamesters of Triskelion had dropped him into the arena. He demurs. Comments on the unexpectedness of the request. Explains that he has a little book he usually refers to to help him with such problems (can't make this stuff up). I again offer that he could use any language or pseudo code. We just want to see how he thinks. He decides he will do the fizzbuzz problem in SQL. My co-interviewer and I are surprised at this choice, but recover quickly and tell him to go ahead. Twenty minutes later he hands me a blank piece of paper. Of the 18 or so candidates we interview, he is the only one who cannot write a single line of code or pseudo code.
I receive an email from this applicant a couple of weeks after his interview. He has given the fizzbuzz problem some more thought. He writes that it occurs to him that the code could be placed into a function. That is the culmination of his cogitation over two weeks. We shake our heads and shortly thereafter attend the scheduled meeting to discuss the applicants.
At the meeting the manager asks about his former co-worker. I inartfully, though accurately, tell him that his candidate does not know how to code. He calls me irrational. After the requisite shocked silence of five people not knowing how to respond to this outburst we all sing Kumbaya and elect to hire someone else.
Interviews are fraught for both sides of the table. I use Fizzbuzz because if the applicant knows how to code it's an early win in the process and we all need that. And if the applicant can't solve it, cut bait and go home.
Fizzbuzz. Best. Interview. Question. Ever.6 -
!rant
Yesterday I got a pretty straight-forward task of fixing SASS linting errors from our project. I thought, "How many errors could there be?" Turns out there were just around 2000 errors across 109 files!
I was almost like, "Man, this is going to take a lot of my time!"
So, I started fixing the errors one-by-one with my headphones on and switching music genres after every 2 hours.
After almost 6 hours of continuous bug-fixing, my mind kind of became repellant to the possibility of the outer world and my fingers automatically fell on the right keys in almost no time. My brain was functioning like a computer itself.
And after the end of 7 hours, I reduced the number to less than 1000 errors.
Today, I continued the task and found out that there were some scoping errors I made yesterday (web developers would know this pain of '&').
And after working for almost 6 hours today, I got the number down to 500.
Not a rant, but I felt extremely content with what I did today.
I guess every day is not just about programming, sometimes, it's also about making your code better.
Thanks for reading! :)6 -
We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!2
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The code im writing is so ugly that i am tempted to pay for github pro, just so i can hide it from society :D
I never thought that not coding for six months could do this much damage9 -
Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.
No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.
It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)
Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.
The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.
Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.
It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.
There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.
The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.
As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).46 -
This is something that happened 2 years ago.
1st year at uni, comp sci.
Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server
I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)
Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.
We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.
No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.
2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes
we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.
1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree
we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"
Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.
Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.
The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.
Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.
And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.
Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:
1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed
2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.
3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.
4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.
Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.3 -
It's long, but trust me you won't get bored. So today, I went to work, even on a Sunday. My supervisor had given the task to finish off my custom module by this week.
There were only the 2 of us in the office. Everyone else enjoyed the holiday.
I got stuck somewhere in the code and approached his desk. We could never see what he was doing on his computer.
Suddenly, I could find him uneasy as I approached and he started jolting St those "ctrl+w" and "alt+f4s" and clutched his mouse to minimize. I said, "Uh sorry, sir but this taxonomy doesn't work in this code, help me out?"
He said, "Oh sure, sit. And he opened chrome trying to act cool. Guess what? Chrome played it like a boss, "Google Chrome didn't shut down correctly. Restore the following pages.
[] Shocking! 99 year old couple have s3x
[] xxx tiny teen shows her.... (i don't remember exactly.)"
The quickest possible glance I ever had. And the most sweaty face I ever saw of his.
He granted me a leave today and extended my deadline for the next week as well. I thought I was screwed :P4 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...
You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...
Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.
I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...
I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.
To the future!5 -
So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).
My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)
My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.
On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!
It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!
I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since2 -
What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.
I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.
So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.
So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.
After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.
Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.22 -
the effort to get girls, and children for that matter into programming has been terrible. I never thought I could find something worse than code.org, but here it is: SmartGurlz (because what could be smarter than spelling your own gender wrong, right?). this was on shark tank and this lady was making robots to try to get girls into programming. they pretty much control dolls on wheels by means of scratch. it's terrible. first of all, how the fuck is that profitable? when a little girl wants to play dolls, what kind of girl wants to *program* it first. jesus, no kid wants that.
second, this girls who code thing makes me barf. the thought process for many organizations trying to push girls to code is "hmm, if we isolate girls and give them lower standards, then maybe they'll decide to go into a male-dominated industry," because, fuck logic right? idiocy is dreadful. lastly, what I hate most about so many of the girls coding organizations, is the fact that they have to embrace the stereotypes. almost every single one cares about "feelings" or something similar. its bullshit.
and don't get me wrong, women should have equal opportunity, but pushing them into stem fields isn't good. bias in the workplace is what we should be talking about, or other topics like women being paid less. trying to make girls interested in programming is complete bullshit, let them do what they want.
back to "SmartGurlz," I looked them up and they confirmed what I expected. the first thing I see? not anything related to programming whatsoever, but different dolls wearing different outfits. girls deserve something better, and shouldn't have to deal with organizations trying to push them into something they don't want to do.8 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.
My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.
Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.
She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"
One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.
We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.
NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.
Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.
Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.
Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.17 -
I am DONE with this woman.
Background: we're a team of 3 developers and I'm the junior in this team and I've been in this shit for a year now. 2 months ago the team leader left for another project and I had to stand in for him in every responsibility against the PM and other teams.
Now I not only had to endure this insecure woman but I was also supposed to work with her! Fast-forward to today, the team leader is back and I thought I could put my headphones on and work peacefully at last.
But no!
I've found out she's sent a faulty code to production - no big deal - and said that over chat (although she's sitting right behind me):
Me: We need to fix this.
Her: What?
Me: *giving some details about the issue*
Her: Your attitude is important when you ask me to do something. Whenever you're writing to me you're typing on your keyboard like you're going to break it on my head.
*me not knowing what to say at this point because we had something stupid like this before*
Me: So you're offended by the sound my keyboard makes? (I have mx brown switches by the way and they're not even loud)
Her: No you're typing too fast when you're writing to me. The sound echoes in the office.
...
Can you fucking believe this shit? I hate people that think they can educate me but have no idea how to rationally respond to situations and take responsibility! I didn't even say anything!
And she's been saying to me she hadn't had a problem with any other people for gazillion years who knows how long and why would she cause a problem now! And thinks I am the problem, fuck YOU!
Since you don't like receiving orders why hadn't you taken the place when the fucking guy went for another project but I had to take all the responsibility? I know why you fucking entitled bitch.
Because you HAD NO IDEA AND YOU STILL DON'T.
So shut the fuck up and do as I say.
Kind regards9 -
Random thought of the day: I'm afraid of posting any picture of my screen/setup where you could read my code because I'm scared that people would zoom in and discover how incompetent I am. Does this make any sense?6
-
sometimes in my head i go through code i wrote some time ago and think: "did i think of this case? if that happens something could go very wrong." when i look at the code i see that i already thought about it and catched the case back then. then i am like "daaaamn i am good".
do you know that feel? :D1 -
Code review time:
Hey Rudy, can you approve my PR? ??? Shouldn't it be can you review my PR?(thought to myself)
Anyway, as a new practice, we(royal we) do not approve PRs with js files. If we touch one, we convert it to typescript as part of a ramp up to a migration that never seems to get here. But I digress.
I look at the laziest conversion in history.
Looked like
Import 'something';
Import 'somethingElse';
Import 'anotherSomething';
export class SomeClass {
public prop1: any;
public prop2: any;
public prop3: any;
public doWork(param: any){
let someValue = param;
// you get the idea
return someValue;
}
}
Anyway, I question if all the properties need to be visible outside of the class since everything was public.
Then if the dev could go and use type safety.
Then asked why not define the return type for the method since it would make it easier for others to consume.
Since parts of the app are still in js, I asked that they check that that the value passed in was valid(no compilation error, obviously).
Also to use = () => {} to make sure "this" is really this.
I also pointed out the import problem, but anyway.
I then see the his team leader approve the PR and then tell me that I'm being too hard on his devs. ????
Do we need to finish every PR comment with "pretty please" now?
These are grown men and women, and yet, it feels oddly like kindergarten.
I've written code in the past that wasn't pretty and I received "WTF?" as a PR comment. I then realized I ate sh*t on that line of code, corrected it and pushed the code. Then we went to Starbucks.
I'm not that old(35), but these young devs need to learn that COMPILERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!!!!!
Ahhhhhh
Much better.
Thanks for the platform.8 -
So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.
Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.
But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.
I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.
I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.7 -
Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.
Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.
Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.
The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.
To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.
Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.
When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.
Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.
In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.
I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.
The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.
Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.
If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.
Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.6 -
Okay guys, this is it!
Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.
So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)
----------------------------------------------------------------
So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?
1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.
2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.
3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁
4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!
5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.
----------------------------------------------------------------
For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?
1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...
2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/
3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...
4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/
5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...
6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/
7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...
9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/
10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...
Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?
1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/
4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/
5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...
7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/
8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/
That's it, folks.
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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.
But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?7 -
I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).
He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.
I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.
I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?
Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.
He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.
I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.11 -
Me: XYZ library just announced that they will stop support for their version 3. I will update our code to use the latest version. It'll probably take 10 hours because we use it pretty extensively.
Manager: Okay. While it's updating, could you work on the ABC feature?
Me: ... no, because I'll be working updating the library.
Manager: Oh so you gotta work on it? I thought it would get updated overnight like my iPhone.4 -
My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.
Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"
He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.
As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.
Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.
Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.
I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)
3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.
Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".
I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.
I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.
The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.
December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.
I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.
In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.
The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.
In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.
I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.
My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.
HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.
In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.
Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.
As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...
Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!
And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).8 -
Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...
Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!
Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.
I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.21 -
I inherited some Java code from a guy that thought you could only return strings from a method.
So how did he ever pass anything other than a string, I hear you ask? He had a (hand crafted, using no libraries, and not escaping anything properly) toXml() and fromXml() method on each object.
Yeah...15 -
Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.
The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.
Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!
You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.
I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.
Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.
ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....
If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.
Lol7 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
TL;DR : do we need a read-only git proxy
Guys, I just thought about something and this potential gitpocalypse.
There is no doubt anymore that regardless of Microsoft's decisions about Github, some projects will or already have migrated to the competition.
I'm thinking : some projects use the git link to fetch the code. If a dependency gets migrated, it won't be updated anymore, or worse, if the previous repo gets deleted, it can break the project.
Hence my idea : create some repository facade to any public git repository (regardless of their actual location).
Instead of using github.com/any/thing.git, we could use opensourcegit.com/any/thing.git. (fake url for the sake of the example).
It would redirect to the right repository (for public read only), and the owner could change the location of the actual repository in case of a migration.
What do you think ? If I get enough ++'s, I'll create a git repo about this.6 -
TLDR: Ever wondered what your project's intro/theme song would be?!
Here's mine..
https://youtu.be/SH8wDkqA_50
Share yours if you ever thought about it or some particular song plays in your head while reading this..
Long(er) version + story: project I am currently working on is notorios in our company.. everyone avoids it, parts of code are untouched for 10+ years.. I used to think it was a 'shitty' project, many frameworks, many parts, many coding styles, many bugs... but longer I worked on it, more I came to realisation, it's not the code, it was the coders.. sloppy coders who didn't give a flying f..
Yes, some things are outdated still, and could be rewritten better (hopefully it will start happening soon! Yay!!), some were already rewamped, new things added... but for the time it was going live, it was majestic. I love solving bugs n problems so I must admit it has grown on me.. my little baby/devil..
Anyhu, one day on skype out of the blue I got this pic from my coworker.. made my day, laughed my ass off.. later that day I was debbuging something and youtube started rolling saw theme song (https://youtu.be/9fwWS6Xo1go)...
When I realised what I was listening too, it made perfect sense.. I was relaxed, at peace.. it clicked.. the song, the project, the bug, the code.. it all made chaotic sense..
I want to play a game..
I realised, project wasn't mean, it was just misunderstood and mistreated.. it can be your best friend if you play nice.
I replied to said coworker that I rhink I just found out my project's theme song and pasted the link.. he laughed, I laughed, my project laughed then it killed my test server.. It was a great day!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
// all true except the project killing server part, that in fact happened on a different occasion
So.. you guys had any moments like this? Any theme songs, intros for your projects?? Or am I the only weirdo who makes associations like this all the time... 🤔🤣😇 ???6 -
The best mentors I had were the people at the company where I started working.
I was doing my master thesis, bored like hell writing about someone else's idea. I decided to drop out and do a 10 week apprenticeship at this company. They had been my mentors in a university project and thought it would be nice to see what I could learn from them. I wasn't wrong.
During that time they taught me Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Node and Git. They taught me about coding standards and how to write better, more maintainable code. They inspired me to keep learning and also to share my knowledge. In the end I didn't stay there, but they helped me get my first real job.
If it weren't for those 10 weeks my career would have been a lot different. I wouldn't be the developer I am today without them and I'm forever grateful.1 -
Some of you may have noticed:
I was working on a new devRant bot recently.
But this time it doesn't just post a boring random quote everyday, like my @RandomQuote Bot.
This time it actually reacts to the user!
Basically the bot uses https://carbon.now.sh to generate nice little syntax highlighted code.
I just thought this could be handy in some occasions here on devRant.
Especially in the "Questions" category!
Here's the link to the introduction of the bot:
https://devrant.com/rants/2178718
A lot of work went into this bot, so it would be great to hear what you think about it and if you're planning on using it!
Thanks for reading!98 -
!rant
I was fiddling around on a website for a bar near me with an arcade. Friends and I already discovered that you could input the konami code on the homepage and be brought to a little easter egg with a chance to win a free beer, free pizza, or nothing.
This evening I was looking at the site a little more and decided to try to find the js code they're using to manage this because I thought it was an ingenious idea. When Looking at the source, I found this little gem. I'm very pleased and wish I had built this site.2 -
Many of you who have a Windows computer may be familiar with robocopy, xcopy, or move.
These functions? Programs? Whatever they may be, were interesting to me because they were the first things that got me really into batch scripting in the first place.
What was really interesting to me was how I could run multiples of these scripts at a time.
<storytime>
It was warm Spring day in the year of 2007, and my Science teacher at the time needed a way to get files from the school computer to the hard-drive faster. The amount of time that the computer was suggesting was 2 hours. Far too long for her. I told her I’d build her something that could work faster than that. And so started the program would take up more of my time than the AI I had created back in 2009.
</storytime>
This program would scan the entirety of the computer's file system, and create an xcopy batch file for each of these directories. After parsing these files, it would then run all the batch files at once. Multithreading as it were? Looking back on it, the throughput probably wasn't any better than the default copying program windows already had, but the amount of time that it took was less. Instead of 2 hours to finish the task it took 45 minutes. My thought for justifying this program was that; instead of giving one man to do paperwork split the paperwork among many men. So, while a large file is being copied, many smaller files could be copied during that time.
After that day I really couldn't keep my hands off this program. As my knowledge of programming increased, so did my likelihood of editing a piece of the code in this program.
The surmountable amount of updates that this program has gone through is amazing. At version 6.25 it now sits as a standalone batch file. It used to consist of 6 files and however many xcopy batch files that it created for the file migration, now it's just 1 file and dirt simple to run, (well front-end, anyways, the back-end is a masterpiece of weirdness, honestly) it automates adding all the necessary directories and files. Oh, and the name is Latin for Imitate, figured it's a reasonable name for a copying program.
I was 14, so my creativity lacked in the naming department >_<1 -
Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer
Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....
Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while
But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...
The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm
He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.
I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.
Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.
My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"
I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)
He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)
Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.
Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.
I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.
Am really Fed up with it all7 -
Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.8 -
My biggest distraction: Working at home. I have a student job at my university and work at home. Just visit my boss every other week to show him the results.
So I always thought it's amazing to work at home. No need to travel to the work space, I can arrange my time as I like, noone's constantly watching what I'm doing.
Sounds great, right? Yeah it is, but is it productive? Lol no.
I'm getting distracted by everything. New mail about some kickstarter stuff, one hour wasted. "Can you help me with that computer problem?" Yeah sure. "Wanna play some League of Legends with us?" Sure, but just one round, I need to work. Ten rounds later I wrote like three lines of code.
I could ignore all that stuff, but I'm at home and can do whatever I want, right?
Results in me working through all night, because then there's noone to distract me.2 -
Just over heard, Dev A was reviewing another team's code ...
Senior Dev A: "I don't understand this teams code. I hate WebAPI. Wish we could use X."
Senior Dev B: "Why can't we use X?"
Senior Dev A: "It's frowned upon."
Senior Dev B: "By whom?"
- couple of seconds of silence -
Senior Dev A: "X is not a Microsoft technology"
- few more seconds of awkward silence -
Senior Dev A: "X is magnitudes slower than WebAPI anyway."
Senior Dev C: "What? How much slower?"
- caught off guard..didn't know Senior Dev C didn't have his headphones on -
Senior Dev A: "Um...I don't know, that is what you told me."
Senior Dev C: "I never said that. I've never used X. I prefer WebAPI anyway, but both WebAPI and X use REST based protocols, I doubt X is magnitudes slower. Actually, I think you told me WebAPI was slower."
Senior Dev A: "Different paradigm."
- second or two of silence -
Senior Dev B: "What?"
Senior Dev A: "Hey, did you see on twitter ..."
Have no idea where he thought that conversation was going. Maybe he was hoping the other devs would dog-pile/attack the code. Pretty funny it backfired. His face when Dev C said 'I never said that' was priceless. Like "Oh -bleep- ..how do I lie out of this one? ...quick, distract with random words or a twitter post" -
One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.
Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me. -
So I'm not sure whether this actually is a believable story or not but I think I'll just share the saddest moment in my life with you.
So.... I've been working with a boy 0.5years younger than me on a project in Java so he could learn something about programming. I was actually dictating him code because he wasn't able to JUST WRITE ONE SINGLE LINE OF CODE WITHOUT ASKING ME HOW TO DO SHIT!!! So I dictated him a for each loop:
Me: "for ( Foo foo colon foos ) {doSomeShit();}"
Him: "for ( Foo foo .. foos ) {doSomeShit();}
For your understanding: in German colon means doppel punkt / double dot. I didn't think someone actually writes two dots... THIS IS SO FUCKING SAD
Please don't blame me for being a bad teacher. I'm inn a class with him and I know we did that in class. I also thought it multiple times to him6 -
Gave the marketing team access to JIRA and gave them permissions to create tickets. Don’t know if that was a management’s design or what. Tickets were poorly written and I had to make frequent follow ups to figure out what the heck was actually being requested. I did get accused of “questioning the request” at least once. It was a big WTF because I think marketing thought they managed dev team but they didn’t.
Marketing also didn’t give a damn about agile processes despite being told some simple rules, such as don’t change your ticket details after a dev has already begun work on it. I would pick up a ticket thinking it’s just html and css updates, then it would change to include an api update. No no no. You’ve just turned a 1 day ticket into a 1 week ticket. I don’t have time for these shenanigans.
I would also submit tickets for code review and marketing would say it’s not ready for review. Then why was that ticket in the to do column for the past two days?! They couldn’t make a decision and would submit revisions every single day.
And they would think devs could do everything. No, never assume the front end dev can pick up back end tasks.
No one on dev team really cared because we were all looking for new jobs anyway. The company was planning to lay us off in a year. Every month a dev gave notice and left.3 -
At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.
Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.
Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.
After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.
Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.
My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V
Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.8 -
Gender Bending For Fun and Profit.
I love how in the 'make your avatar' area, if you select female, and then click facial hair, theres nothing to select from.
Like a massive fuck you to every gender bending "down with meritocracy" purple haired dicksniffer in sanfran.
Also I'm sorely disappoint for desk items, theres no
1. giant dildos
2. anime figures/weeb shit
3. mini monoliths (I asked the site devs about this, they replied "we can't do that dave.")
4. a shirtless option for my female avatar
5. edgy scrolling numbers and code, like in the matrix
6. hoodies. They're the modern leather jacket.
7. Big nasty gnarly biker beard which I'm currently in the process of growing. How am I supposed to intimidate other anonymous cowards and mock them over the size of their beard compared to my own avatar's e-beard size? It's quiet girthy and lengthy, I assure you!
This is completely unrelated, but I thought devducks were like quick one-off debug sessions that could be bought from other devrant users.
I was disappointed when I discovered it was just merch.
On the otherhand I'm glad as fuck it's not. Site would be flooded by broken-english speaking goat humping dickheads.
How am I supposed to show off my ability to code with completely unrelated avatar change ups when no one will allow me to emasculate my avatar?16 -
young user @Mizukuro asked days ago for ways to improving his javascript skills.
I wasn't sure what to say at the moment, but then I thought of something.
Lodash is the most depended upon package in npm. 90k packages depend on it, more than double than the second most depended upon package (request with 40k).
Lodash was also created 6 years ago.
This means lodash has been heavily tested, and is production ready.
This means that reading and understanding its code will be very educational.
Also, every lodash function lives in its own file, and are usually very short.
This means it's also easy to understand the code.
You could start with one of the "is..." (eg isArray, isFunction).
The reason for such choice is that it's very easy to understand what these functions do from their name alone.
And you also get to see how a good coder deals with js types (which can be very impredictible sometines).
And to learn even more, read the test file for that function (located in tests/<original file name>.js. For the most part they are very readable and examples of very good testing code.
Here's the isFunction code
https://github.com/lodash/lodash/...
Here's the test for isFunction
https://github.com/lodash/lodash/...
The one thing you won't learn here is about es5, 6, or whatever.3 -
So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.
In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.
So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.4 -
I was talking to a friend of mine(more of an acquaintance really) about our shared interest in Go and how I am trying to see if I can implement it more and more into my daily activities(simple CLI utilities, maybe a web app or two) and he mentioned how much he likes it after being part of a Java shop for such a long time. He said that he got tired of the verbosity of Java and how Go was such a "breath of fresh air"
var i SomeShit
do.SomeShit(&i)
if do.Error != nil {
panic(do.Error)
}
fmt.Println("Could not agree at all")
On how bullshitty it is to say that one switched over to Golang because of the verbosity of other languages, specially when anything meaningful that you might do with the code requires constant checking.
And let us not
forget := lol.bullshit(); forget != nil {
about some of the other bs you get to do
oh look scoped errors
}
.....like I get it man. I like the language, no, It ain't replacing C or C++ for low level shit, not with a garbage collector are you fucking high?
But yes, I do like the language, they got a lot of shit right, the thing is, I feel like I know everything about it already since A) shit is way too simple, simple enough to be used by anyone really and B) other than goroutines this language does not really bring anything new to the table, far as I can tell.
I mean shit. I thought I was at odds with Python disliking syntactical whitespace enough to make me try and not use an otherwise perfectly good lang(Python I love you but hate syntactical whitespace) but Golang really puts me at odds. I love it but dislike it at the same time.8 -
I started doing a little HTML coding for a training site I wanted to build for my employer. Every time I thought "there must be a way to do this..." There was! It was so rewarding to build something by myself that I kept going into CSS and JavaScript, then PHP, and now Python. A few months ago I could just about code a hyperlink and make some bold text, so I'm quite proud of how far I've come :)1
-
I'm a contractor at a product company and today I had the pleasure of working with some jQuery.
A function needed to be called before another function, hard work right?
So I moved the call to the function 3 rows higher, checked it in, set the task as ready for test and started to look for other tasks.
Within a couple of minutes I get a direct message from another dev, let's call him Steve.
Steve wanted me to set the task to ready for code review instead of test, so I did just that and tried to move on.
Some minute or two later Steve contacts me again:
"It would be great if you'd move the comment so it'd be over the call to the function"
Well, I'm not one of those who likes comments... If you need a comment, it's probably not good/readable code. In some cases sure, it might be a complex block coming up.
Sorry, lost my train of thought.
I answered Steve : "Are you sure, I could just remove it instead?"
(for readability S will be Steve and M will be me)
S: Well, it's always good to have comments
M: In this case I think it will be alright.
S: But it's nice to see what the function is doing.
M: I'll do it if you really want me to.
S: It's better to have the comment than to not have it and needing it.
M: Okay then
The name of the function : LoadOrganizationTree()
And this is the comment :
//Load organization tree6 -
Decided to spend my weekend on a little side project that I thought I could finish quickly.
Not only does my code not work, but what I wrote is so horrible that I'm honestly ashamed. Its like the despicable porn that you sometimes end up watching and the horror of realizing what the hell you just watched after you finish - I thought my code was good, but really, it was trash.
Before I started writing I though to myself, "I'll finish this project and then I'll upload it to my Github to expand my repository", but now I cringe at the thought of someone else reviewing this pile of shit I call my code.
It's 2 am here in Israel. I know I should go to sleep, but I'll just stare at the ceiling, feeling unproductive because everything I did today is literally worthless.
How the fuck do I justify this shit to myself? Calling this a "learning experience" feels like a fucking joke.
Honestly, I don't know why I chose Python to do OOP when Kotlin would have served me much better.
But, there's always tomorrow, isn't there?2 -
A follow up for this rant : https://devrant.com/rants/1429631/...
its morning and i have been awoke all night, but i am so happy and feel like crying seeing you people's response. :''''') Thank-You for helping a young birdie like me from getting exploit.
In Summery, I am successfully out of this trickery, but with cowardice, a little exploited and being continuously nagged by my friend as a 'fool'.
Although i would be honest, i did took a time to take my decision and got carried away by his words.
After a few hours of creating a group, he scheduled a conference call , and asked me to submit the flow by which my junior devs will work.
At that time i was still unclear about weather to work or not and had just took a break from studies. So thought of checking the progress and after a few minutes, came up with a work-flow, dropped in the group and muted it.
At night i thought of checking my personal messages , and that guy had PMed me that team is not working, check on their progress. This got me pissed and i diverted the topic by asking when he would be mailing my letter of joining.
His fucking reply to this was :"After the project gets completed!"
(One more Example of his attempts to be manipulative coming up, but along with my cowardice ) :/
WTF? with a team like this and their leader being 'me'( who still calls him noob after 2 internships and 10 months android exp), this project would have taken at least one month and i was not even counting myself in the coding part(The Exams).
So just to clarify what would be the precise date by which he is expecting the task, to which he said "27th"(i.e, tomorrow!)
I didn't responded. And rather checked about the details of the guy( knew that the company was start-up, but start-ups does sound hopeful, if they are doing it right) .A quick social media search gave me the results that he is a fuckin 25 year old guy who just did a masters and started this company. there was no mention of investors anywhere but his company's linkedin profile showed up and with "11-50" members.
After half an hour i told him that am not in this anymore, left the group and went back to study.(He wanted to ask for reasons, but i denied by saying a change of mind ,personal problems, etc)
Well the reality is over but here comes the cowardice part:
1)Our team was working on a private repo hosted on my account and i voluntarily asked him to take back the ownership, just to come out of this safely w/o pissing him off.
2)The "test" he took of me was the wireframe given by their client and which was the actual project we 5 were working on. So, as a "test", i created 15 activities of their client's app and have willingly transferred it to them.
3) in my defence, i only did it because (i) i feared this small start-up could harm my reputation on open platforms like linkedin and (ii)the things i developed were so easy that i don't mind giving them. they were just ui, designed a lot quickly but except that, they were nothing(even a button needs a code in the backend to perform something and i had not done it) . moreover, the guys working under me had changed a lot of things, so i felt bad for them and dropped the idea of damaging it.
Right now am just out of sleep, null of thoughts and just wondering weather am a good person, a safe player or just a stupid, easily manipulated fool
But Once again My deepest regard from my heart for @RustyCookie , @geaz ,@tarstrong ,and @YouAreAPIRate for a positive advice.
My love for devrant is growing everyday <3 <3 <3 <35 -
I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.
And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.
I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.
After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.
I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?
I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.
Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.
Oh well 🤷8 -
This happened 3 years ago in my previous company. It was a small start up company and we worked on PHP stack. One of the its ex-founders had written Windows Mobile App which now had to be upgraded with new features. So we hired this new dot net guy. I always thought dot net guys were ELITE coders and was excited to see how they work.
While I played Xbox and had fun, our dot net guy stuck to his workstation furiously working. My boss who was casually strolling out of his office for a stretch saw dot net guy working hard and suggested we all developers should take him as an example.
20 days went by and each day the dot net guy did the same. He came, he silently worked on his workstation, he left in the evening. In those 20 days my boss asked twice to the dot net guy if he has finished features he was assigned but he said he did not. After a month when he said the same negative answer and had nothing to show for the work he has done he was fired.
I was so curious to see what code that ELITE coder had written for a month but could not deliver a feature(Maybe some error he could not fix?). So I open the code repo on which he worked and I see 30 commits from that guy to it. He had made a single commit each day(Fair enough he wants to commit everday before leaving). It was time to check his commit diffs to see his ELITE code. What do I find? In every fucking commit he either added a blank line to the DocBlock or removed the same. Nothing less nothing more! So much for the hyped not-so-ELITE dot net guy...1 -
I know I added a rant to wk65 already, but this is another one.
At my final project at school, I made an app that registered all your medicine, surgeries, appointments and medicine alarms, so it worked as a medical history. It also was able to show on the lock screen, in case of emergency, your allergies and recent but dangerous surgeries.
At the presentation day there were 3 guys, me and two of my colleagues. The first one had a car dealership tracker, really awesome app, which I helped build by teaching him everything I knew about Android, I didn't do any code, I really just taught him. The second guy, he made a pharmacy tracker, to which, again, I helped make without doing MOST code (I helped on obtaining GPS data). First presentation was awesome, second presentation was really boring because the guy was constantly showing the judges that the app could detect when you were offline (really simple to do).
At my presentation, I thought it was horrible, super nervous and I even thought I was trembling.
So, then, the judges spoke, apparently they knew I helped the previous two, they thought I had the best app, they thought I had the best presentation and needless to say, I got 20/20 on the project. One of the judges even said that if I was selling the app, he'd buy it.
The second colleague didn't like that, and I later found out he was focusing so much on that offline stuff because he wanted to show he was better than me, shows that I really need to see who I really should help...
I felt really really badass after that day, because I left the school, and to this day, I had the best app/project and grades that school had seen and given. Even more when the school offered me a scholarship!3 -
Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.
My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.
Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.
I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.
There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.
You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.
Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.
Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.
Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S
Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.
Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.
"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"
"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"
We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.
Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."
Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.
There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.
TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.
Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.
It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.
My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.
*THE END*
If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.
Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.
Exactly at the char limit9 -
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🖕🏽3 -
Employer: Hey, we are moving an API update live tomorrow morning that could affect our apps. Can you regression test the apps to make sure they all work?
Me: The API team is pushing code overtop of live endpoints that can break them?
Employer: Yes, we need the updates to work with a new product we are developing.
Me: And nobody thought about versioning these endpoints so we guarantee uptime on all existing services using them now?
Employer: We looked at that but it cost extra and required us to use the cloud solution so we don’t use versioning.
Me: Okkk… I also take it that the API’s don’t have integration tests written?
Employer: What are integration tests? Are unit tests the same thing?
Me: No, so when do I need to regression test all 7 production apps?
Employer: The API’s are moving to production at 4am and we need it signed off by 7am.
Me: I only have 3 hours to regression test 7 production apps at 4am? Each app, if I just skim over them, would take me 2 hours each. I will do my best but that’s a very short time to ensure complete functionality.
Employer: Don’t you have unit tests?1 -
When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.
My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.
Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.
My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.
I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.
I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.
This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.
I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.
I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.
It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.
I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.
Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.
Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.53 -
Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.
(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)
I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.
Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.
Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.
Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).
All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.
Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.
Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?
Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)
What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.
And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.
Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.
Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.
Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).
It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.
What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.
Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.rant fuck you shitty reviewer micromanagement by micrococks wk279 living nightmare fml glassdoor reviews don't lie9 -
I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.
https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...
My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.
Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.
Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...
We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.
We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.
Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.
The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.
Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.
Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.
Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.
Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.
My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.
He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.
Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.
So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.2 -
I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.
The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).
Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).
So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).
Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.
So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.
Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.
The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.
First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"
What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!
So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."
Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!
A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:
E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him
That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"
So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".
Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.
Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"4 -
Writing some code to sift through some demographic data. Thought I could parallelize a few calls. Now I have a race race condition...
#blackcodematters1 -
Well fuck me, thought I could use pyload for my youtube music playlist downloader (has live progress updates, can download playlists, can be setup to download via cron too and ignore existing files..), but the plugin hasn't been maintained for a year (fails with ~60-80% of videos), it was based on youtube-dl code, which has been updated, but fixing that plugin with the code from youtube-dl would take a while, ughhh..2
-
In my school, eleventh grade (so nearly "Abitur", A levels), we got the task to create a program which will be running on every computer here which should replace the Classbook (like a book where homework and lessons and stuff is written down).
Now, the class before mine already did a part of that, a program to share who is ill/not at school, with a mark whether it is excused or not.
So far so good. They all seemed not that bad when they were presenting it to us. Then, the first thing: they didn't know what git is. Well, okay I thought.
Next, there was this password field to access the program. One of them entered the password and clicked enter. That seemed suspiciously fast for an actual secure login. So fast, the password could have been in the Code...
Yesterday I copied that program and put it into a decompiler.
And... I was right.
There were the login credentials in plain text. Also, haven't thought of it but, IP address + username + password + database name were there in plain text, too.
Guess I am going to rewrite this program down to the core2 -
Today, I was so certain that all the functionalities were implemented to handle some webhook calls from a third-party service. It's a script I wrote that has been running for 2+ years uninterrupted or without any issues.
We got some "complaints/notices" today that some "special" actions weren't registered, so I thought that the third-party service just didn't send those actions via their webhook. After some research I found a part where they explained that those actions trigger the webhook like any other action etc. So..
First thought: "okay, maybe they implemented that at a later stage" (was not the case)
Second thought: "maybe this is not what the client meant" (it was)
Third thought: "Then it should have been implemented" (it wasn't)
Okay, time to look at the code to see where this could get handled but apparently isn't. All the actions look good, nice, clean handeling etc, nicely documented code (gave the 'past-me' mentally a high-five)..
I scroll further down to that specific action and it was quiet obvious why it didn't work.. I just see an empty function with the comment:
"//TODO: maybe handle this action one day. don't know what this does atm, probably unused.. Will take a look at it next week.."
.. :D
I took my 'high-five' back..I just needed to copy-paste some other code and change 1-2 parameters..1 -
I just have to rant...
7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.
A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)
Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.
It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.
And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”
I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.
Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏4 -
VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.
There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.
My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.
Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.
But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p
My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.
So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.
Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.
Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..
:q!4 -
My hatered for stack overflow has been incredibly increasing every day.
-Was struck in a basic problem for last 16 hours.. finally solved it at 2:am, was very happy.
- its quite a nice situation with fragments in Android, so thought of writing an example q/a on stack overflow.
- its FUCKING 7 am. It took me an hour to document my code(mind you, i always document in the best way possible, created a nice readme.md file) , and when it comes to uploading, it says " your question seems to have mismatch index". Well, fuck it, but okay i will edit it.
-Edited whole code, made sure it looks fine in preview pane , pressed upload.
-same fucking answer... for past 3 hours i have been trying to add questions and answer in various possible ways but that shit don't want to accept it..at the end uploaded the md to my github profile and added a fucking link there...
Please, someone upvote that damning link, i qant some repo their so i could ask other authors with questions in the comment sections(and if possible, add back my code into my answer) ;____;
https://stackoverflow.com/questions...7 -
>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.2 -
Have you ever thought about quitting coding and going down another career path? You can't. Coding is a desease that sits in you giving you urges to code. Never thought about it until now, but I could never stop coding!4
-
"Ralph" has been working on a process that updates a field in a SharePoint list and bellying aching for almost a month. Couldn't use the C# client, too hard...tried to use the SharePoint REST entry point, using C# too complex...Javascript also was overly complex. Tried to use PowerShell, that worked but could only run on the SharePoint Server and it didn't have access to the 3rd party system.
In our stand up this morning, again, he was belly aching he is still not done because of the complexity of SharePoint.
I thought "Good lord...what the frack is the problem? Surely other devs in the world aren't having this much of a problem."
Fire up google...search for an example...copy the MSDN C# example...run it...tada...updated the SharePoint list just fine. Maybe 15 minutes of effort (< 20 lines of mostly copy+pasted code).
Next stand up, I'm contemplating calling him out on the BS, but I suspect he had working code for a while. Wouldn't be the first time he has dragged his ass working on a project until folks get fed up waiting and he has an "intellectual breakthrough" and brags how all his effort was worth the time. Similar to the firefighter who starts fires just so he can 'be the hero'.1 -
Keep this in mind: I don't like WordPress and PHP at all!!!
So a couple of days ago my boss asked me if I could extend a custom made WordPress plugin made by our intern. First thought: sure why not? Boss says: it has to be done in less than 100 hours of work (an estimate done by my boss and the intern). Me: I can't tell you that before I have seen the code and what functionality has to be in the extension. Boss: Cool, look it over this weekend and tell me if you want to do it or not.
I looked it through and my answer will probably be: NO WHERE IN HELL am I gonna are this in less that 100 hours! 1. no tests has been performed so I have absolutely no clue if his code works.
2. variable names are mostly: $string_query (whatever that means?), $result, $string_temp and so on.
3. Methods and functions are more than 250 lines long, with shitty formatting, and more comments than code. WTF?
4. The estimate has been made by an intern and my boss (doesn't know much about programming). I haven't been consulted about it....
5. No version control. No branches, no commits other than initial commit. Great.
6. Most comments in the code just tells me what I can read from the code. What it returns and what it takes as params. Can I please know wtf your method call named $booking->run () does? I still haven't found this method in the code after 1 hour of intensively looking for it...
FFS man... Not gonna do this, even though I thought it would have been an interesting project initially.
Sorry for the long rant... I just wish the intern would have consulted me about all this shit, since he obviously have bad practices. *sigh*6 -
So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.
I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)
Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.
Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.
So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..3 -
Posted a question on SO and someone thought they could get clever and turn my Feathers + Nuxt snippet into a functional SO code (to preview or whatever). I told him it's not going to work for various reasons, so he deleted his answer and "down voted" my question. Thanks dude... Thanks a lot...
#StackUnderflowed1 -
I'm working part time as I'm a student and I always thought working in a company would be awesome as I learned programming all by myself and could actually do things now.
30% is updating, compiling
50% is using google to find out if I can even use 27 .net frameworks together and make it work on Android and iOS
15% is finding out what the error code is supposed to mean
And 5% is actually using a programming language.2 -
Most of 2020 was a bad dev experience for me. I was paid to remake a system because it was
a ) insecure
b ) inconsistent
c ) hard to mantain (spaghetti code)
I thought I could focus on the backend and just reuse the front end but even that was unusable.
Basically had to redo it from scratch and since I made the fatal mistake of letting THEM estimate how long it would take, I worked most of the year instead of just 2-3 months.
Never again. After being done with the project I still had to be 'reachable' for the coming weeks if anything happened.
I turned off my phone during one weekend and then the next thing I know the only other dev at that small company is asking me for details on the project (meaning they just decided to offload everything to him). Never heard from them again and I'm hoping that won't change.
Beware small dev companies with less than 5 actual devs.
Best: Dev wise this year has been bad or not-bad but nothing 'great' comes to mind.
My fun times and enjoyments were not derived from dev activities.1 -
Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??
It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.
Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.
All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.
Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.
Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.
If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.
Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.
Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!24 -
At the institute I did my PhD everyone had to take some role apart from research to keep the infrastructure running. My part was admin for the Linux workstations and supporting the admin of the calculation cluster we had (about 11 machines with 8 cores each... hot shit at the time).
At some point the university had some euros of budget left that had to be spent so the institute decided to buy a shiny new NAS system for the cluster.
I wasn't really involved with the stuff, I was just the replacement admin so everything was handled by the main admin.
A few months on and the cluster starts behaving ... weird. Huge CPU loads, lots of network traffic. No one really knows what's going on. At some point I discover a process on one of the compute nodes that apparently receives commands from an IRC server in the UK... OK code red, we've been hacked.
First thing we needed to find out was how they had broken in, so we looked at the logs of the compute nodes. There was nothing obvious, but the fact that each compute node had its own public IP address and was reachable from all over the world certainly didn't help.
A few hours of poking around not really knowing what I'm looking for, I resort to a TCPDUMP to find whether there is any actor on the network that I might have overlooked. And indeed I found an IP adress that I couldn't match with any of the machines.
Long story short: It was the new NAS box. Our main admin didn't care about the new box, because it was set up by an external company. The guy from the external company didn't care, because he thought he was working on a compute cluster that is sealed off behind some uber-restrictive firewall.
So our shiny new NAS system, filled to the brink with confidential research data, (and also as it turns out a lot of login credentials) was sitting there with its quaint little default config and a DHCP-assigned public IP adress, waiting for the next best rookie hacker to try U:admin/P:admin to take it over.
Looking back this could have gotten a lot worse and we were extremely lucky that these guys either didn't know what they had there or didn't care. -
This isn't about dev, but is related as it was one of my first times seeing how tech could be abused or used in a creative way.
When I was a kid doorbell ditching was a thing. Also, flashing was a thing. Dudes would be naked in a trench coat and flash random people. The 80s was a strange time.
Anyway, my brothers liked to pull pranks. So they took apart a flashlight and mounted a switch into some wires to hold in their hand. They wore a trench coat, had all their clothes on, but wired the light part of the flashlight to their belt at about crotch level.
Then they went to houses at night, rang the doorbell. When people opened the door they flung open their trench coat and blinked the flash light a couple of times and ran away. Everybody in the neighborhood thought it was hilarious.
Ever since then I have had an interest in repurposing technology and code for fun things.1 -
Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.
I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.
After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.
But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!
Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.
If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.
And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.
So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.undefined student job revolución fuck university shitty universities student life education im just a bit pissed11 -
This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.
The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;
Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.
I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.
And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.
Yay. Thanks for reading :)2 -
tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---
One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.
There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".
So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?7 -
Now my client does not want to rely on Amazon S3 because of the One Outage that it ever had a couple what weeks ago I forgot already. So my dumbass blurts out well we could always just back up to some other image or file storing website. But now I'm expected to implement this right away when I really haven't thought about it at all I mean I would have to write some sort of failover and some sort of daily or syncing mechanism. I guess I should forget about any direct upload to S3 code that I have written. Really I guess I have to wrap all of the image and file handling stuff with my own solution. Which actually that will be very nice when it is done and I could use this on other projects but it's quite a lot of work for something that I don't feel we really need at this stage in development. Just because you're using stuff on production that has am enormous red TEST label in the way of the ui doesn't mean i can code bullet proof software any faster4
-
So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.
Now...
I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.
I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...
I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.
Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.
Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.
Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.
Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.
But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..
Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.5 -
Ok apparently I forgot rants can only be edited within the first 5 minutes, I thought it was 30, and you can't rant 2 times in 2 hours so I'll have to wait before posting this.
So, I'm doing a Genetic Algorithms class, something I liked since I was 15 yo and didn't know shit about coding, but I loved the carykh videos about it. (here is part 1: https://youtu.be/GOFws_hhZs8 )
The yearly class consisted of 3 little projects to be able to do the final exam and an investigation project to pass the subject without a final exam.
We had to make teams, and I got together with 5 more people.
I have a lot to say about these 5 people, but the only thing I'll say is that I was the most experienced programmer among the 6 of us, if they had any experience at all. Mind this is a third cycle class.
We were allowed to use any technology, as long as we wrote the important algorithms by hand, of course.
The development of the first project was such a mess, that one of the members left the subject.
While developing the second one, we were given the topic for the investigation project; fractals.
It took a lot for us to find an application of fractals where we could use genetic algorithms. Once we found it, fractal antennas, we had to learn about antennas, so we interviewed professionals, and such. We ended up learning to evaluate antennas.
We also found a site that used some parameters to generate fractals, we had the parameterization.
We just had to code it. It was July and we just had to code it by October.
We were 5 people, and "we" were so busy writing the little projects, we fucking couldn't finish the investigation project.
We just had to write the proper algorithms and GUI specifics, without even having to write boilerplate (we used the first project as a template), and they still took so much that we didn't have time for the important project.
That sucked, because I had been coding and investigating in many weekends, I spent countless hours on them, I had to pause development on other projects for these ones; and after all that we have to do the (very shitty) final exam.
Since May, the average people together "working" on the different projects was 2.6. And 100% of the time, I was one of them.
We tried to speed up things in the last months but even with the deadline on us and the project not even started, there was no time we all got to work together.
Dude projects don't just get made, someone has to develop them.
It's so sad we had the project ready to be made and 5 people couldn't finish it. There was so little to do to pass and yet these people couldn't.
I guess it's my bad too. I wish I could rush the project in a couple of weeks, but unfortunately the guy with a job and 8 other subjects can't.
You can find the project in my GitHub. I'll do a requiem of what it was to be one of these days, after I catch up with all I left aside for this subject...rant genetic algorithms project systems engineering failure subject college investigation fractals wk2833 -
Tldr: fucked up windows boot sector somehow, saved 4 months worth of bachelor thesis code, never hold back git push for so long!
Holy jesus, I just saved my ass and 4 months of hard work...
I recently cloned one of my SSDs to a bigger one and formatted the smaller one, once I saw it went fine. I then (maybe?) sinned by attaching an internal hdd to the system while powered on and detached, thinking "oh well, I might have just done smth stupid". Restart the system: Windows boot error. FUCK! Only option was to start a recovery usb. Some googling and I figured I had to repair the boot section. Try the boot repair in the provided cmd. Access denied! Shit! Why? Google again and find a fix. Some weird volume renaming and other weird commands. Commands don't work. What is it now? Boot files are not found. What do I do now? At this point I thought about a clean install of Windows. Then I remembered that I hadn't pushed my code changes to GitHub for roughly 4 months. My bachelor thesis code. I started panicking. I couldn't even find the files with the cmd. I panicked even more. I looked again at the tutorials, carefully. Tried out some commands and variations for the partition volumes, since there wasn't much I could do wrong. Suddenly the commands succeeded, but not all of them? I almost lost hope as I seemed to progress not as much as I hoped for. I thought, what the hell, let's restart and see anyway. Worst case I'll have to remember all my code😅🤦.
Who would have thought that exactly this time it would boot up normally?
First thing I immediately did: GIT PUSH --ALL ! Never ever hold back code for so long!
Thanks for reading till the end! 👌😅8 -
So I am currently making an app for a retail franchise and that retail franchise is getting a website done by a company. Since the recipes that the guys want are going to be on the website, the web dev company made a mysql db that has all the recipes.
I thought since the people at the head of the retail franchise have spent time gathering these recipes, I'll just get the data for the app from the db.
I called the project manager for the website up (That's the only contact I got) and asked if they could given me access to the db to use for the app or if I could make a script that would get data from it.
Now this is the part where I tell you I'm only 14 years old and these guys know that because of the head of the retail company.
He puts it on speaker and asks me to say it again and I hear quite a bit of people laughing. I knew what was happening. He asks do you know anything about databases, I explained to him what a db was and how I was going to get the data from it and etc. Half way through me telling him that it would be beneficial for both me and the retail guys, he hung up the call and blocked me.
I asked the head of the retail company if he could ask them about it and he said that he didn't know much about tech so he couldn't ask and if I could find an alternative option.
You might be thinking that the company didn't want to give me permission to access the db which is respectable but they have done this previously as well.
I gave them advice on putting a rewards card feature on the site so the customers could track their points on the site as well as on the app and the PM said "We don't want advice from you."
It has now been 3 weeks on and off because of school where I had to code a ui for the lady at the company to enter all her recipes for the app and waste a lot of time communicating with different people to get all the data.
I hate being disrespected because of my inexperience when I can truly do some extraordinary things with software. 😡😤😣
Its also very hard to find a job being 14.5 -
Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.
We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.
Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)
The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window
So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.
This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.
So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.
No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)1 -
There's this thought that keeps popping up in my head more frequently recently.
We are people who do heavy mind work. Our quality of life directly depends on our ability to come up with solutions. We've been training our minds for years, for decades, to get to the point where we are now.
Now stop for a moment. And imagine. You wake up one morning and you realize you can no longer code. You forgot all of it. You still can copy-paste answers from SO, but you don't know what questions to ask to get to those answers.... Your mind has pulled the DROP TABLE PROGRAMMING;COMMIT; stunt. From hero to zero in just 1 night.
You have no clue what happened, no idea whether you will recover. How does that affect your identity? Would you still try to climb the programmers' tree to the sweet spot you are in now? Would you choose some simpler profession instead, considering your age and time required to master that other profession? If you choose another profession - what would it be?
What would you do with your personal projects? You can't continue them yourself obviously... Would you let them die with the loss of your skills?
How closely is your profession related to your identity?
Now that I consider myself a person who's quite good in the field, this is becoming one of my fears. Sadly, it'll most likely come true someday. Either some accident or just old age, or even diseases/conditions at younger ages - there are so many things that could mess up your mind - the sole tool critical for our profession [to the picky ones: lumbers can't swing axes w/o hands, postman can't deliver mail w/o legs, politics can't lie without tongues, and we, engineers, cannot build with our minds even slightly off].7 -
Have you ever had the moment when you were left speechless because a software system was so fucked up and you just sat there and didn't know how to grasp it? I've seen some pretty bad code, products and services but yesterday I got to the next level.
A little background: I live in Europe and we have GDPR so we are required by law to protect our customer data. We need quite a bit to fulfill our services and it is stored in our ERP system which is developed by another company.
My job is to develop services that interact with that system and they provided me with a REST service to achieve that. Since I know how sensitive that data is, I took extra good care of how I processed the data, stored secrets and so on.
Yesterday, when I was developing a new feature, my first WTF moment happened: I was able to see the passwords of every user - in CLEAR TEXT!!
I sat there and was just shocked: We trust you with our most valuable data and you can't even hash our fuckn passwords?
But that was not the end: After I grabbed a coffee and digested what I just saw, I continued to think: OK, I'm logged in with my user and I have pretty massive rights to the system. Since I now knew all the passwords of my colleagues, I could just try it with a different account and see if that works out too.
I found a nice user "test" (guess the password), logged on to the service and tried the same query again. With the same result. You can guess how mad I was - I immediately changed my password to a pretty hard.
And it didn't even end there because obviously user "test" also had full write access to the system and was probably very happy when I made him admin before deleting him on his own credentials.
It never happened to me - I just sat there and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, I even had a small existential crisis because why the fuck do I put any effort in it when the people who are supposed to put a lot of effort in it don't give a shit?
It took them half a day to fix the security issues but now I have 0 trust in the company and the people working for it.
So why - if it only takes you half a day to do the job you are supposed (and requires by law) to do - would you just not do it? Because I was already mildly annoyed of your 2+ months delay at the initial setup (and had to break my own promises to my boss)?
By sharing this story, I want to encourage everyone to have a little thought on the consequences that bad software can have on your company, your customers and your fellow devs who have to use your services.
I'm not a security guy but I guess every developer should have a basic understanding of security, especially in a GDPR area.2 -
As I already said on devrant, I'm a freelance web developer and I also often sell my services for teaching, loving that. Currently I'm teaching PHP with 30 students and it's going very well.
But yesterday, I received an offer for giving another course next month, this time on HTML and CSS, for a company I don't know yet. Almost every line of this email is wrong, outdated by 20 years, or just basically meaningless...
So I thought I could do my best to translate this as close as possible to the original, preserving the wrong formulations too, just for you devranters fellas.
"Hello,
I have an offer for a 2 days course for 5 people (level 1+ and/or 2), on HTML5 and CSS3. Below, the program :
1. XHTML AND CSS2 INTRODUCTION
Advantages and benefits of change
Understanding compatibility for different versions of browsers
HTML, XHTML, CSS edition tools : presentation of the different tools
The CSS language : different types of selectors : class of selector, identifier of selector, contextual selectors, grouped selectors
Blocks of text, boxes of text
The CSS1, CSSP, CSS2 properties
Relative and absolute measures units
2. LAYOUT TECHNIQUES
Full CSS, XHTML websites demo
Positioning with the position property, positioning with the float property
Columns creation
Layout for forms
Layout for data tables
Layout for menus
3. INTRODUCTION TO SVG (SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS)
Role and importance of SVG
Using SVG on client side : basic shapes
SVG structure of document, tags examples
Using CSS styles with SVG
Different integration methods for SVG in a XHTML document
4. OPTIMISATION OF JAVASCRIPT CODE
Introduction to DOM and Javascript
Access to document objects : different access techniques, using this keyword, create elements dynamically
Positioning elements with the help of Javascript : positionning elements relatively to the mouse, move elements
Show/hide elements for creating hierarchical menus
Code optimisation techniques : using objects, objects litterals, loops optimisation
Can you please give me your availability ?"
Seriously...
CSS-fucking-1 ! Is it a course for dinosaurs ?
...And if only my rant was just about the program...
It's totally impossible to cover all these subjects in only 2 days with people of different levels and experience.
The guy exactly said to me : "don't worry about the program, it's an old text but they agreed to it anyway. They just want to learn HTML and CSS, some of them already know it but want to learn more, and the others are total beginers.".
And here is the meaning for the "(level 1+ and/or 2)" part in the email.
So... Surprizingly, I accepted the offer, but asked for at least a 3rd day. I'm waiting for their answer, but I'll do it anyway, adapting the course content to the actual students knowledge. I need the money, after all.
Wish me luck...
It's just sad that these formation companies are selling bullshit to clients that just want to learn something useful. It's too often like that, they sell shitty/useless programs and we have to catch up in real time with students that don't understand why they don't learn what was told to them.3 -
I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.
Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.
First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?
But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.
"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.
Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.6 -
More adventures in fixing specs.
This particular failing spec is in an included spec helper; I cannot run the spec itself because rubymine is stupid and doesn't know how. Not kidding. I also don't know the codepath it's actually testing because it's fucking convoluted, so I need (rather: want) a debugger to progress. I put breakpoints everywhere I thought it could be, and... nothing.
The stacktrace shows the calling spec in the helper module, a generic `process` method that just calls `super` (from where? who knows!), and a `wrap_every_action` in the ApplicationController. in other words: absolutely nothing helpful. I stepped through the code for most of an hour and didn't get anywhere; just saw lots of rails internals.
ugh,
I'm going to keep bashing my head against this, but what the fuck, why can't you give me something goddamn useful!?4 -
Product Management thought of automating an entire legacy product so they funded undisclosed amount to program management who in turn hired >20 contract devs managed by architects and dev managers with zero functional or technical knowledge of product and who in turn went ahead automating the product in selenium, end result of which was an useless automation framework with lot of browser specific dependencies and whuch could run only on one setup environment and migrating test cases to another environment and running is almost impossible and tyrannical to configure. The automation test cases are highly disorganized with all generic setup, DB configurations and business case test data mixed up in same config files and which need to be rewriten every time ported from one environment to other.To add misery to my woes as a dev working in that product I was told to utilize that framework and enhance the quality of my code by writing inline automation Cases for the same. I am left speechless thoughtless and emotionless after that decision.2
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I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.6
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tl;dr; A co-worker and I had an disagreement on our package structure. They went straight to our team lead instead of trying to solve this in our team and by that letting me do my job.
Do I overreact by assuming that this was malicious?
A co-worker asked me to do their code review today. There was nothing really wrong there, mainly something a bad generator created.
However at one point we had a disagreement about the naming structure of the packages. We both agreed to disagree, so I thought we could bring that up in the next daily, as it's something the team should agree on.
Shortly after that, they told me on Slack, that they relayed the matter to our team lead to get their opinion. Wtf.
My role in the team is that of a technical lead. Even though I like to discuss such topics in the team and not straight up dictate decisions.
By going directly to our team leader, they basically circumvented the whole team. This really rubs me wrong the way.
Maybe I'm just overreacting?5 -
Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.
I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.
That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.
So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.5 -
We rewrote the whole thing, except for iFraming some old pages in. We had to, the system was fucking awful and couldn't cope with any of the new mission critical requirements.
Client didn't understand the scope. Our project leader somehow snuck it in and we worked on it for months. We were sure we'd be kicked off the whole project... Somehow things didn't crash and burn. How it didn't blow up defies rational thought and the laws of physics. The new system worked, the client was happy, and boss made a lot of money.
Lead dev worked weekends for what feels like an eternity, it really was his baby and no one else on our company could have done it. It's where I finally learned how to do things the proper way; DDD, unit testing and TDD, architecture, building strong components in front-end, you name it. Before that I had a great nose for code smells and how not to do stuff, but now I got to see a proper system for the first time. It was glorious.
Then lead dev left and the system degraded quite a bit because new team didn't keep to the architectural patterns or general best practices. But we had a good run.1 -
Some guy bought a whole bunch of city specific domain names once and wanted me to code the websites for him and manage and support the sites for 5% equity in his business. I told him you realize I can buy my own domains for very little money and build the sites for 100% ownership. His idea was not so bad for that time but he just thought that I was a nerd and he could just use me and I would just be passive and go along being that I'm desperate to make friends.
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Always thought windows source code would be the most untidy and disgusting code i could imagine but then I realised world of warcraft existed... Just imagine how horrible that shit would be!1
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Work on a product to categorize text… previous guy implemented an NLP solution that took 20 per body of text (500 words or so) in a $400/mo AWS instance, was about 80% accurate and needed “more data for training” 🤦♂️
I thought (and still think) that for some use cases AI is straight up snake oil. Decided instead to make an implementation with a word list and a bunch of if statements in Go… no performance considerations, loops within loops reading every single word… I just wanted to see if it worked and maybe later I could write it more optimized in Rust or something…
first time I ran it it took so little that I thought it had a bug… threw more of the test data we had for the NLP, 94% accuracy, 50 flipping milliseconds per body of text in a $5/mo AWS instance!!!
Now, that felt good!!
(The other guy… errr… left, that code is still the core of product of the company I built it for, I got bored and moved to another company :)3 -
Is it just me or is it really fuckin amazing when ur teacher tells you after a year that you are a better programmer than he is 😒 even tho ur just a beginner?
I just started learning to code and i was already better at it than the person who is supposed to teach me... which is great if you ask me #sarcasm
And when we finish a simple task on if statements - which he thought was gonna take us a whole hour - in like 5 minutes, he doesnt let us work on our own programs: "Can you close that? Its not related to the lesson"
Ffs man! 😤 Am i supposed to sit here for an hour just staring into the void, doing fuck all, while i could actually improve my skills?
Then you go home and learn more in two hours than you'll ever do throughout the following 3 years in school.... 😧
If this is not a complete waste of time then i have no fucking clue what is.
GCSE Computer Science sucks (at least in my school). Is there anyone out there with similar issues or is it just our lucky bunch?
My advice to young/beginner programmers:
If you really want to learn, please just google what ur interested in and use stackoverflow6 -
Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code
It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining
There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?
The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it
So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point
Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it -
Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.
Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.
First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.
Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.
Ya, he got the same grade as me.
Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right
Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)
He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.
Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA
Is it me or does he have something against me?7 -
A loooong time ago...
I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.
Kind of.
Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.
Fast forward three months (yes, three months).
I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.
So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.
He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...
When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.
I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?
This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.
Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.
I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!
Haha. Oh no.
So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.
The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.
And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.
I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.
Hm.
Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...
On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.
This doubles the strangeness.
I want over to my colleague's desk.
I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.
"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"
What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?
"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"
"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."
"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"
You. Did. What?
I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.
So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.
Yep
It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.
Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.
Hm.
Project Management.
Karma's a bitch, right? -
Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.
Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.
So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!
I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.
Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.
I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.
Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".
To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.
OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.
Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.
In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.
OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.
At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .
After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1! -
In the 90s most people had touched grass, but few touched a computer.
In the 2090s most people will have touched a computer, but not grass.
But at least we'll have fully sentient dildos armed with laser guns to mildly stimulate our mandatory attached cyber-clits, or alternatively annihilate thought criminals.
In other news my prime generator has exhaustively been checked against, all primes from 5 to 1 million. I used miller-rabin with k=40 to confirm the results.
The set the generator creates is the join of the quasi-lucas carmichael numbers, the carmichael numbers, and the primes. So after I generated a number I just had to treat those numbers as 'pollutants' and filter them out, which was dead simple.
Whats left after filtering, is strictly the primes.
I also tested it randomly on 50-55 bit primes, and it always returned true, but that range hasn't been fully tested so far because it takes 9-12 seconds per number at that point.
I was expecting maybe a few failures by my generator. So what I did was I wrote a function, genMillerTest(), and all it does is take some number n, returns the next prime after it (using my functions nextPrime() and isPrime()), and then tests it against miller-rabin. If miller returns false, then I add the result to a list. And then I check *those* results by hand (because miller can occasionally return false positives, though I'm not familiar enough with the math to know how often).
Well, imagine my surprise when I had zero false positives.
Which means either my code is generating the same exact set as miller (under some very large value of n), or the chance of miller (at k=40 tests) returning a false positive is vanishingly small.
My next steps should be to parallelize the checking process, and set up my other desktop to run those tests continuously.
Concurrently I should work on figuring out why my slowest primality tests (theres six of them, though I think I can eliminate two) are so slow and if I can better estimate or derive a pattern that allows faster results by better initialization of the variables used by these tests.
I already wrote some cases to output which tests most frequently succeeded (if any of them pass, then the number isn't prime), and therefore could cut short the primality test of a number. I rewrote the function to put those tests in order from most likely to least likely.
I'm also thinking that there may be some clues for faster computation in other bases, or perhaps in binary, or inspecting the patterns of values in the natural logs of non-primes versus primes. Or even looking into the *execution* time of numbers that successfully pass as prime versus ones that don't. Theres a bevy of possible approaches.
The entire process for the first 1_000_000 numbers, ran 1621.28 seconds, or just shy of a tenth of a second per test but I'm sure thats biased toward the head of the list.
If theres any other approach or ideas I may be overlooking, I wouldn't know where to begin.16 -
There has been a post today about the existence of too many js frameworks. Which reminds me of this awesome post https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels...
At first I thought someone was corpseposting, as it is my understanding that the js ecosystem is calming down a bit. But then I noticed that post got almost 20 upvotes. So here's my thoughts:
(I'm not sure what I'm ranting about here, as it feels kinda broad after writing it. I think it's kinda valid anyhow.)
I'm ok with someone expressing frustration with js. But complaining about progress is definitely off to me.
How is too many frameworks a bad thing?
How does the variety and creation of more modern frameworks affect negatively developers?
Does it make it hard to understand each of these new frameworks?
Well, there's no need to. Just because it has a logo and some nice badges and says it will make you happy doesn't mean you should use it.
You just stick to the big boys in the ecosystem and you'll be fine for a while.
Does it make you feel compelled to migrate the stack of every project you did?
Well, don't. If you don't like being on the bleeding edge of js, then just stick to whatever you're using, as long as it's good code.
But if a lot of companies decided to migrate to react (among others frameworks), it's because they like the upsides: the code is faster to write, easier to test and more performant.
In general, I'm more understanding/empathic with beginner js programmers.
But I have for real heard experienced devs in real life complain about having to learn new frameworks, like they hate it.
"I just want to learn a single framework and just master it throughout my life" and I think they're lowering the bar.
There's people that for real expect occupying positions for life, make money, but never learn a new framework.
We hold other practitioners to high standards (like pilots or doctors), but for some reason, some programmers feel like they're ok with what they know for life.
As if they couldn't translate all they learned with one framework to another.
Meanwhile our lives are becoming more and more intertwined with technology and demand some pretty high standards. Standards that historically have not been met, according to thousands of people screaming to their devices screens.
Even though I think the "js can be frustrating" sentiment is valid, the statement 'too many js frameworks is bad' is not.
I think a statement like 'js frameworks can go obsolete very quickly' is more appropriate.
By saying too many js frameworks is a bad thing you're
1) Making a conspiracy theory as if js devs were working in tandem to make the ecosystem hard,
But people do whatever they want. Some create packages, others star/clone/use them.
2) Making a taboo out of a normal itch, creating.
"hey you're a libdev? just stop, ok? stop"
"Are you a creative person? Do you know a way to solve a problem in an easier way than some famous package? it doesn't matter, don't you dare creating a new package."
I'm not gonna say the js world is perfect. The js world is frantic, savage, evolves aggressively.
You could say that it (accidentally) gives the middle finger to end users, but you could also say that it just sets the bar higher.
I liked writing jquery code in the past, but at the same time I didn't like adding features/fixing bugs on it. It was painful.
So I'm fine with a better framework coming along after a few years and stealing their userbase, as it happens almost universally in the programming world, the difference with js is that the cycle is faster.
Even jquery's creator embraced React.
This post explains also
https://medium.com/@chrisdaviesgeek...13 -
just found out a vulnerability in the website of the 3rd best high school in my country.
TL;DR: they had burried in some folders a c99 shell.
i am a begginer html/sql/php guy and really was looking into learning a bit here and there about them because i really like problem solving and found out ctfs mainly focus on this part of programming. i am a c++ programmer which does school contest like programming problems and i really enjoy them.
now back on topic.
with this urge to learn more web programming i said to myself what other method to learn better than real life sites! so i did just that. i first checked my school site. right click. inspect element. it seemed the site was made with wordpress. after looking more into the html code for the site i concluded all the images and files i could see on the site were from a folder on the server named 'wp-content/uploads'. i checked the folder. and here it got interesting. i did a get request on the site. saw the details. then i checked the site. bingo! there are 3 folders named '2017', '2018', '2019'. i said to myself: 'i am god.'
i could literally see all the announcements they have made from 2017-2019. and they were organised by month!!! my curiosity to see everything got me to the final destination.
with this adrenaline i thought about another site. in my city i have the 3rd most acclaimed high school in the country. what about checking their security?
so i typed the web address. looked around. again, right click, inspect element and looked around the source code. this time i was more lucky. this site is handmade!!! i was soooo happy because with my school's site i was restricted with what they have made with wordpress and i don't have much experience with it.
amd so i began looking what request the site made for the logos and other links. it seemed all the other links on the site were with this format: www.site.com/index.php?home. and i was very confused and still am. is this referencing some part of the site in the index.php file? is the whole site written inside the index.php file and with the question mark you just get to a part of the site? i don't really get it.
so nothing interesting inside the networking tab, just some stylesheets for the site's design i guess. i switched to the debugger tab and holy moly!! yes, it had that tree structure. very familiar. just like a project inside codeblocks or something familiar with it. and then it clicked me. there was the index.php file! and there was another folder from which i've seen nothing from the network tab. i finally got a lead!! i returned in the network tab, did a request to see the spgm folder and boooom a site appeared and i saw some files and folders from 2016. there was a spgm.js file and a spgm.php file. there was a contrib, flavors, gal and lang folders. then it once again clicked me! the lang folder was las updated this year in february. so i checked the folder and there were some files named lang with the extension named after their language and these files were last updated in 2016 so i left them alone. but there was this little snitch, this little 650K file named after the name of the school's site with the extension '.php' aaaaand it was last modified this year!!!! i was so excited! i thought i found a secret and different design of the site or something completely else! i clicked it and at first i was scared there was this black/red theme going on my screen and something was a little odd. there were no school announcements or event, nononoooo. this was still a tree structured view. at the top of the site it's written '!c99Shell v. 1.0...'
this was a big nono. i saw i could acces all kinds of folders. then i switched to the normal school website and tried to access a folder i have seen named userfiles and got a 403 forbidden error. wopsie. i then switched to the c99 shell website and tried to access the userfiles folder and my boy showed all of its contents. it was nakeeed naked. like very naked. and in the userfiles folder there were all, but i mean ALL files and folders they have on the server. there were a file with the salary of each job available in the school. some announcements. there was a list with all the students which failed classes. there were folders for contests they held. it was an absolute mess and i couldn't believe it.
i stopped and looked at the monitor. what have i done? just to learn some web programming i just leaked the server of the 3rd most famous high school in my country. image a black hat which would have seriously caused more damage. currently i am writing an email to the school to updrage their security because it is reaaaaly bad.
and the journy didn't end here. i 'hacked' the site 2 days ago and just now i thought about writing an email to the school. after i found i could access the WHOLE server i searched for the real attacker so if you want to knkw how this one went let me know in the comments.
sorry for the long post, but couldn't held it anymore13 -
Mornings. Not just the run of the mill “I’m not a morning person” but I legitimately would be more productive if I could work night shift. It’s easier to think at night, and easier to sleep during the day. Not just a night owl, but it’s hard to breathe laying down at night sometimes. Sometimes I randomly can’t sleep. I’ve never had this trouble during the day during the occasions I get to sleep for long periods during the day. The morning is prime sleeping time IMO. Not wanting to wake up is one reason, but the changing weather helps and it just feels right.
I also don’t feel awake til the afternoon usually. Even if I get enough sleep and coffee. Code churns slow in the a.m.
I dream of night time being work time with long, restful naps durning the day. I feel more creative at night, and it’s easier to focus. There’s less thought of “oh it’s a nice day I should do x”
Just sucks that it’s not largely accepted and there’s not enough other night hawks to hang out with on my off days. And my work won’t let me do such a schedule. Everyone is an insufferable morning person.
Early to bed early to rise is a load of shit. We should be allowed to sleep at times it makes us happy.3 -
So, I fixed this shitty code, real shitty, inlined some shit and shaved off some other shit and it was fixed...
The reviewer says we'd better request a review from the dude that's actually responsible for that piece of shit code - what the fuck...
Here comes this bossy fucker saying they don't really understand that shit so they don't know for sure if there could be a better way...
Me, ignorant as always, popped a vessel figuring out a cleaner way.
I tell those sick fucks that we'd need to change some shit over at another repository, also maintained by the latter turd.
The latter turd says they like my second suggestion better, to which I reply,
'ok, I agree.'
In my mind that pull was done, should be closed and water under the bridge but oh how clueless I was...
SIX FUCKING MONTHS later the same shitbag pops out of god knows where asking if I still wanted to work on the pull....
"Motherfucker, my pull was for this fucking code, not for doing work on the other, obviously I'm not interested in doing that or else I would've opened a pull there instead of here, dumb-dumb" - I thought
Thou what I said was:
"No, I don't. I agree it's a problem better solved at the other repository."
Maybe I was a bit mean, was I? I don't know, honestly, people confuse me2 -
I don't feel ready to search for jobs. I don't feel that coding is for me.
There is this guy that wanted to study physics and changed to System Information. He is more logical and rational than me. I'm too "emotional" to code, I get stressed easily when something isn't working.
I'm doing this because I wanted to challenge and prove myself that I could be more. I could have been a teacher, but I thought that it wasn't enough for me and I wanted to go further.
Every day I'm outside of my comfort zone and I don't know where this path will lead me and I'm scared and at the same time, I'm hoping for a happy end.
Maybe my brain is not made for coding, maybe it is more on the database side. But I'm sure of one thing: this year I'll give my best and everything at my current internship to get better at coding with Android Studio, Windows Form, Angular and React. My results will determine if I''m a good fit for coding.
Remember one thing: not everyone can easily learn how to code, but you will never know if you don't try it. Go out of your comfort zone in your life and you will meet a whole new world.2 -
My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.
Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.
Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).
I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.
Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.
It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.
At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.
Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.
Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.
Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him. -
So, I'm looking into something and end up on Stack Overflow. Someone posted the question:
"Does minified javascript improve performance?"
This question was old as shit, all they way from 07/25/09, and about an Adobe Air application. (Remember that? Me neither...) It had a great, accepted, and still accurate answer, posted the same day the question was asked. Now, fast forward 8 years and on 12/08/17 (A mere 7 months ago...) the following answer was posted. I don't know what they were thinking, but here it is, complete and unabridged, with my comments in square brackets:
"I'd like to post this as a separate answer as it somewhat contrasts the accepted one: [Somewhat contrasts? More like completely contradicts...]
Yes, it does make a performance difference as it reduces parsing time - and that's often the critical thing. For me, it was even just simply linear in the size and I could get it from 12s to 4s parse time by minifying from 3MB to 1MB. [First off, your parse time should NEVER be THE critical thing, but secondly, and more importantly, WHO THE FUCK HAS 1MB OF MINIFIED JS ON A PAGE!!!]
It's not a big app either, it just has a couple of reasonable dependencies. [THERE IS ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOTHING REASONABLE ABOUT ANYTHING HE JUST SAID! What dependancies is he using?! You could use minified and not even gzipped jQuery, AngularJS, Vue, Ember, React, AND Dojo libraries on the SAME PAGE, AND have 118k of application code, AND STILL NOT HAVE HIT 1MB QUITE YET!!!]
So the moral of the story here is: Yes, minifying is important for performance - and not because of bandwidth, but because of parsing. [Javascript should NEVER take longer to parse then to download, even on a low powered device...]"
So, yeah, I'm at a loss for what this guy was thinking, but the thought the people like this exist, and that my browser might one day be subjected to their horrific nightmare of code terrifies me...2 -
!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/1 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
Sooooo this is the thing.
For a stupid fucking project at work we basically have to scrum manage a bunch of individual components on a rather large web app.
We start with the html and css and js bs and we all have to work on different sections of one page at a time. Large blocks right? Ok cool.
Originally I had suggested to build everything inside individual php files and then stack them up with require(). As fucking simple as fucking that. Except that the manager does not have php on her pc. The other two developer don't either. I am the only one that fucks with php OUTSIDE our fucking servers.
Go fucking figure...the lead developer does not fuck with php outside the servers.....man
So, because i know it would be a shitstorm with something as basic as installing i dunno...fucking xampp my manager said that she needs a different solution.
Fuck it...fine...whatever. i know go. So i make a fucking server wich upon being fired you can just code the templates and paste them where they need to go. Docs and everything..a sane folder structure and everything and a fucking pipleline for the assets and everything. I would have thought that shit was good enough but I even added a cmd tool that merges all the fucking html files together into one html file with all the shit included.
All in Golang. It works, its fast and i can just give them the fucking folder with the exe and it will work.
I dunno if this was the best way to do it. But it took me maybe 20 mins to do it and it works.
I would have expected our manager to be impressed but she legit did not gave two fucking shits about the fact that one of her developers is able to create this mini server for static sites shitstain project in 20 minutes.
Man I don't want praise. She thinks that jquery is the best thing in the world so I don't expect much. But shit man.......a better reaction would have been better. She basically went meh ok as long as it works.
I also showed them a demo of a flutter project to replace the shitty ass webview filled school app that they have for android and ios. Shit is native and it looks beautiful. Ask me what she said.
Go on, fucking ask me.
She said tha if it would take me much time to continue on that the she would rather leave it to the third party vendor that currently makes the app.
I told her that such shitty app costs the school 40 fucking thousand dollars a year that I could do in a fucking month, which would also be better since it would raise the salaries of me and the other 2 developers and will more importantly make us more valuable to the school.
Said that she would think about it because we have a lot of projects.
I
Fucking
Hate
It
When someone fucks with my ability to make more money. I hate it fam. And i fucking despise being limited by other people.
Fuck this week.
I am never gonna grow in here. Ever. But it pays the bills so fuck it.6 -
Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?
Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.
So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.
I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.
It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.
I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.
On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.
I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.
Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.
I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.
It dreads me to say it, but I need help.12 -
Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".
hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.
Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.
so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```
I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.
Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.
To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.
Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.
Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.
After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.
Sometimes I hate my job.4 -
turned down software engineering job offers after college because I thought it be a good to take a temporary position as a controls engineer so I could pay off student loans faster.
realizing how big of mistake it was. working long hours on uninteresting tasks. I just want to code for a living. -
Visual studio code
I usually use IDEs and am in love with everything made by Jetbrains. I am also to lazy to setup dual boot on my pc, so I live with windows 10. After one of the recent downgrades Microsoft distribute, they shipped this lightweight text editor called visual studio code with it.
It lied to me, that it's a good editor for coding C. It even tells me that I can compile and execute the code from inside the editor, similar to vim. I went to the settings and found a dark theme, for the best best feature this "editor"has to offer.
I give it a try by opening a source file with a normal double click. Editor gets focused, but the code is nowhere to be seen. Retrying conforms my, that this piece of shit is literally not able to open files UNLESS you drag and drop them into the editor. HOW FUCKING USELESS IS THAT?
Next I want to compile the program. Guess what, that functionality was not given or at least I could not find it (same goes with the manual)
Even with dark theme it burns my eyes to use this editor. There are almost no useful shortcuts. The functionality is not even comparable to vim. I always thought eclipse was bad, until this shit was installed.
It might work well for other people. Maybe it has functions, that just don't work on my pc, but from what I've seen: visual studio in general and especially that editor feels like Microsoft trying to replace the toolet paper with sandpaper.8 -
Worst experience of my teachers?
I had handed in an exercise, which the teacher ostensibly thought was so elegant that he wanted to show it in class. I felt complimented and recognized. But then he proceeded to show the code on the screen, and I objected: "this is not my code, don't give me credit for this piece of shit". It had written-by-said-teacher all over it, because his coding style includes mysterious omnipresent acronyms that you could never guess the meaning of. My peers didn't believe me and thought I had written said not-so-elegant code, and the fuss about it degraded my reputation.
To this day I'm wondering as to why he humiliated me like that. He probably had best intent, but I don't get it -
i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.
i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.
when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"
this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.
imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have
- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience
on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.
our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.
etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.
when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...
but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.
it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...6 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
proxying youtube
today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.
this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.
I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".
And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.
Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.
At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.
Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.
But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.
One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.
Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.
Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.
It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.
But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.
Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.
But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.
I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.
Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.
I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.
I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.
It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.
These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.2 -
if (rant !== story)
System.out.println("Dev rant story time")
A coworker mentioned to me that I might have depression as part of my personality. They think this because I always feel at my best when I'm being active/productive (programming) or doing meditation practice. I thought that was strange.
Bit of a brief background, I've had depression since I was about 12 and I still get small bouts of it into my late 20's. I've been on antidepressiants for a very short time and I've been through talk therapy multiple times. It was a lot worse then it is now and I believed I have it under control.
My coworker thinks that I ended up dealing with it for so long that it has become a part of my personality so I don't notice it actively. The whole thing has left me sort of, I don't know, jaded. Or maybe just afraid that it could be true?
I thought about how I have a very all or nothing attitude in life. I don't think about getting a house because I don't put too much faith in myself towards having a family. Or how I have to make very radical changes to my life immediately if something starts triggering the new depressive episode. If I can't code or read at night I'll hope in the car and drive with no destination in mind for several hours just to keep my mind at ease.
I don't know. It sorta upsets me because I always thought of depression as something you need to "get out of", but now I wonder if my case was severe enough that I've adapted my life around it.9 -
A long time ago you sent me an email with the subject 'I love you', I then got so excited that I forwarded the letter to all my contacts, and they forwarded it too.. I can't describe the words for the feelings I had back then for you. I felt into love with you, really. But there were always troubling moments for me.
For example when 'Code Red' showed up and found your backdoor. Man I was pissed at that time. I didn't know what to do next. But things settled, and we found each other again.
And then that other time when this girl named 'Melissa' was sending me some passwords to pr0n sites, I couldn't resist. She was really awesome, but you know, deep in my heart that was not what I wanted. I somehow managed to go back to you and say sorry. We even moved together in our first flat, and later in our own house. That was a really good time, I love to think back at those moments.
Then my friend 'Sasser' came over to us one night, do you remember how he claimed that big shelf in our living room, and overflooded it with his own stuff, so that we haven't a clue we are reading yet offshelve? Wow that was a disturbing experience.
But a really hard time has come when our dog 'Zeus' got kicked by this ugly trojan horse. I really don't want go into details how the mess looked like after we discovered him on our floor. Still, I am very sorry for him that he didn't survived it :(
Some months later this guy named 'Conficker' showed up one day. I shitted my pants when I discovered that he guessed my password on my computer and got access to all my private stuff on it. He even tried to find some network shares of us with our photos on it. God, I was happy that he didn't got access to the pics we stored there. Never thought that our homemade photos are not secure there.
We lived our lives together, we were happy until that day when you started the war. 'Stuxnet..'! you cried directly in my face, 'you are gonna blow up our centrifuges of our life', and yeah she was right. I was in a real bad mood that days back then. I even not tried to hide my anger. But really, I don't know why all this could happen. All I know is, that it started with that cool USB stick I found on the stairs of our house. After that I don't remember anything, as it is just erased from my memory.
The years were passing. And I say the truth here, we were not able to manage the mess of our relationship. But I still loved you when you opened me that you will leave. My 'Heartbleed' started immediately, you stabbed it where it causes the most pain, where I thought that my keys to your heart are secured. But no, you stabbed even harder.
Because not long after that you even encrypted our private photos on our NAS, and now I am really finished, no memory which can be refreshed with a look at our pictures, and you even want my money. I really 'WannaCry' now... -
As someone from the clothing/retail industry, I could never imagen a life within Tech.
I had a shop, it went very well. I had my ups and downs like most shop owners. Since the shop was on not on your typical shopping street, I had to make good relationships with my customers.
I enjoy talking to people, listen to peoples opinions, their day to day activities etc. After some years I really needed some much needed improvement to the administration and overall solutions. Checking around the internet I found some tools but expensive, or tools without those stuff I really needed.
As a can-do:er I am, I thought I would hook some tech people up and sell my idea, so they could make the product while I design it. They started build it, I watch. But they were busy all the time, no time to build something else. They taught me some code and suddenly, I was back at school learning to code.
And now, I'm a system developer. Really enjoying programming and the amazing world of technology. Even when I mostly talk to people over the web :')1 -
Lets make a rant before going to bed
Who had the marvelous idea that a developer's proeficiency could be measured by years?
So at my new job Ive been waiting for credentialls, server access software installation, etc ( i know i know but thats for another rant ) and all that idle time has given me opportunity to crawl in the company's sharepoint page which has the career path for a software developer, since Im a student Im listed as trainee, but after that I have to wait 3 years + certifications to be considered as senior and then be able to hop to next hierarchy level Software Designer and then another three years to be able to become a software architect. So my point, as I was seeing this I thought "I dont wanna wait 6 years to become a software architect, Im going to be better faster in order to become needed and make them promote me faster"
The thing is Ive always wanted to become a softwsre architect and learning that I have to wait 7 years to be considered a proeficient architect just makes me mad.
Pd: One of the requirements for a senior developer is knowing Lines of code time stimationundefined pichardo for president lines of code school is bad trump rules dont do drugs architect loc career career transition1 -
Code on own side project the whole night without sleeping til 6-7am right before going to work because today is half day only in office.
I thought I could manage it but haha totally wrong, First 2 hours were good, during last 2 hours I was trying my best not to fell asleep.
Worst decision ever.2 -
Instead of ranting I thought it would be nicer to ask for opinions/solutions: How to cope with a collegue that keeps producing trainwrecks of code which you have to first refactor to make it work in a more logical/structured way? Yes, his initial solution works (in a way), but it's just not how 99% of the other developers would solve it. And yes, we've shown him quite a few times how it should/could be (in a positive and constructing manner)5
-
Not a rant but sort of a rant.
Getting REAL fucking tired of the corporate rat race.
Thought Bubble ...
{If I quit this stupid job I could do freelance sites}
Then I realized that I have no idea what skill set it takes to be a freelance developer. I only know my one little corner. Once I commit my code it goes off down the assembly line for others to worry about testing, deployment, hosting, security and other things I have no idea about.
So tell me freelancers, is the grass greener? What additonal skills do you have to have the us enterprise folks would have no idea about?
Or are you making huge bucks where you overcharge for Wix sites that do not suck?9 -
So, funny story with a bit of self promotion at the end.
I was recently checking out some apps on playstore and found that my first ever , "launched just to experiment" app (released 1.5 years ago) has received more than 5k downloads . I was very happy about that so posted a small message on LinkedIn .
Now , my LinkedIn profile consists of 98% people who are totally strangers and never met me ( is it just me or do you also get a lot of stranger connect requests there?). So my usual post rarely ever goes beyond 5 or 6 likes.
Bit idk how there too my post got 35+ likes and now i was on cloud9.
So i finally decided to kick my ass and release some update to that app ( it had around 70% pity comments like "nice first app,but it should have this x feature",. "overall nice but it could use an x feature " etc.
And boy what my journey was in the last 72hours.
Firstly my madhead laptop started killing me with the battery failures and constant hang.
Then my past asshole self tried to give me a middle finger. So i have this whole partition in my memory where i keep my Android stuff and apps. It has a special folder named published zone and i keep all my published app codes and related files there.
I was fairly certain that this app's code eill be also there,so i opened it, found the code and tried running it.
Turns out my asshole self had tried to mess around the code so much that all the db layer WAS fucked up, all the ui WAS changed and no code was working.
"Not to worry", i thought. I always use git and there would be a correct version some commits before. WRONG. I HAD CHANGED THE WHOLE FUCKING WORKING PRODUCTION CODE AND DIDN'T MAINTAIN A VCS!
Also this was the verbose and shitty java code my 1.5 year before self so loved to write, so it was taking me way more time to figure out what's happening in an already fucked up code.
So i tried a couple of ways to get back my working code :
- I tried looking for a google recommended solution. Those guys take my whole app code build and distribute via playstore, but they provide no means to retrieve back the original code.
- i checked my (occasionally) back up hard disk but no. My hard disk would have 100s of movies from 2016 , but not a useful piece of fuckin code.
- i also tried to get my apk and decompile it via some online decompiler. Here the google again fucks up and don't allow me to get my apk directly. Meanwhile i found a ton of shady websites which are hosting an apk of my app without my knowledge O_o . I tried to decompile on of them but code was even more non understandable than my fuck up code.
So i ended up looking at both the mess up code and decompiled code and coded the whole app from scratch ( well not scratch, i extracted the resources and some undamaged activities from the mess up code . Also github was down for more than 3 hours yesterday , at the same time when i was trying to look onto some repositories)
Lessons learned:
- DON'T FUCK UP WITH THE PRODUCTION CODE
- MAINTAIN VCS
- Your laptop is shit reliable, github is also shit reliable , so save code at multiple places.
- there are way more copies of your code lying on the internet than you think.
Checkout my app here :https://play.google.com/store/apps/...3 -
Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.
My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.
We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."
As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".
His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.
But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...
Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.8 -
OK what the actual fuck is going on within this company.
TL;DR: Spaghetti Copy/Pasted code that made me mad because it's just a mess
I just looked into a code file to search for a specific procedure regarding the creation of invoices.
I thought "Oh this is gonna be a quick look-through of like 1000 lines MAX" turns out this script is 11317 fucking lines long and most of it's logic is written there multiple (up to 6-7 times). And I'm not talking about a simple 10 lines or something. No! Logic of over 300 lines.. copy & pasted over .. and over .. and over?! I mean what the fuck did this guy drink when he wrote this.
Alsooo 10000 of those 11317 lines is ONE FUNCTION.. I kid you not! It's just a gigantic if / else if construct that, as I said before, contains copy-pasted code all over the place.
Sadly my TL thinks that code cleanup / optimization is "not necessary as long as it works" like wtf dude. If anyone wants to ever fix something in this mess or add a new feature they take a few hours longer just to "adjust" to this fucking shit.
This is a nightmare. The worst part: This is not the only script that has shit like this. We got over 150 "modules" (Yeah, we ATTEMPTED something OOP-ish but failed miserably) that sometimes have over 15000 lines which could be easily cut down to 1/3 and/or splitted into multiple files.
Let's not start about centralization of methods or encoding handling or coding standards or work code review or .. you get the point because there's a character limit for one rant and I guess I'd overshoot that by a lot if I'd start with that. Holy shit I can't wait until my internship is over and I can leave this code-hell!!2 -
Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.
I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.
So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.
Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.
Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):
* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest
Any of you have further recommendations?
Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?
Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?
What about the basics of BDD and XP?
Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?
Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?
Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?
During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?
I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.
What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?
Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?
Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.7 -
Double rant....whattttt!!!
1) That moment when you're like god this code is awesome/I'm a genius/Can anyone else other than me even comprehend how to do something this awesome? AND THEN you shift to "wait a second..." Is this actually super convoluted/inefficient/there is a way easier way to do this? :o
2) Do people even know that google can provide them with like any and all of human knowledge? I feel like 50 times a day in my head I'm screaming "GOOGLE IT!!!!!!!!!!"
2 examples....
Earlier today I ctrl+alt+down arrow my co-workers computer because he left it unlocked and I was feeling especially awry so when he kept saying I don't know how to fix it, I was like google it!!!! I'm teaching you a valuable life skill...
Second. I was at my in-laws house and we got on the topic of what does "impeachment" actually entail? So my mother in law was like hmmm I thought it meant so and so....I'll have to ask my friend so and so the next time I see her....she's a political science major or something like that....
In my head....
I'm like.....
Or....
You could.....GOOGLE IT!!!!!!2 -
I thought this morning as I thought about how I on my personal projects consistently leave filterless comments that I could make a site called goth coding. And write a language spec that is ridiculous and silly with comments like “and i labored away my last inkling of happiness bled away doing mandatory overtime to write this wretched fragment of code future generations will discover and ask what perhaps became of me”3
-
Story of my first successful project
Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.
Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"
I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).
I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".
Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.
Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)
Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."
End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team. -
I don't get why the company where I work is pushing a new cloud platform to create website with.
So yesterday I dove in a website(that an intern made) to make a search and filter on some items.
I thought sure, just finished a website with a lot of search thingies and filters.
But this intern wrote 500 lines of code to just get items from an API endpoint. Dude really why??? Ok, your cool an all and you definitely have skills, but this is just ridiculous.
Burned an day on the piece of shit, while this is in an stupid cloud platform. Without even es6 to write JavaScript. I could have write the whole thing in react In just one day!!
Just work locally on your machine and put you code in a git repo. And deploy when finished. That how I like to work, but no this company wants to keep pushing this cloud platform.
For fucks sake, just let me code! And don't let me use vs or that stupid cloud platform.4 -
I like rants that are thought provoking and push a message forward regardless of whether they may sting a little, so for my first post on here I'd like to hit at home with many of you.
Html5 "Native" Applications are not needed. Let's cover mobile first of all, the misconception that apps are written in either javascript or Native android/ Native ios environment. Or even some third party paid tools like xamarin is quite strange to me. OpenGL ES is on both IOS and Android there is no difference. It's quite easy to write once run everywhere but with native performance and not having to jump through js when it's not needed. Personally I never want to see html or css if I'm working on a mobile app or desktop. Which brings me to desktop, I can't begin to describe how unthought out an electron app is. Memory usage, storage space for embedding chromium, web views gained at the expense of literally everything else, cross platform desktop development has been around for decades, openGL is everywhere enough said. Finally what about targeting browser if your writing a native app for mobile and desktop let's say in c++ and it's not in javascript how can it turn back into javascript, well luckily c++ has emscripten which does that simply put, or you could be using a cross complier language like haxe which is what I use. It benefits with type safety, while exporting both c++ and javascript code. Conclusion in reality I see the appeal to the js ecosystem it's large filled with big companies trying to make js cross development stronger every day. However development in my mind should be a series of choices, choices that are invisible don't help anyone, regardless of the popularity of the choice, or the skill required.8 -
<!doctype confusedRant 😕>
Plot: we need to release our website in two weeks which holds at least a thousand pages. All these pages are manually migrated from the old website, which doesn't have a database. Current status: 650 pages/1000 are completed, 40 different templates need to be adapted. I'm alone on these templates, my colleagues create the pages and fill the new database
So I'm working on the templates a WebDev coded for our website on a licensed CMS, and had this decently simple html block that looks like a square and consisting of roughly this (Emmet style):
a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p
After adding another <a> element inside the p, I noticed that my <a> wouldn't display and bust the whole look of the square.
Just for more details, the CSS the dev made is ultra specified (meaning each element is too precisely "described" : div.class .child .child2 { /* styles */ } when it could be .class .child2 for example). Also, the templates he made need to be compatible with any "module" the website has, thus the need of this high specificity
So I fired up the DevTools to check what happened, and had:
Expected: a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p > a
Actual result: some new a.area were wrapping the <strong>, the <p> and the <a> I just added. The source code was not showing any of this but just the rules I initially wrote - the expected result
Wtf?! I thought the JS the dev made was adding elements. I disabled said JS, and bam, these a.area were still wrapping everything!! What black magic would add these stupid tags I never asked for.
So I went looking in the CSS files in case some wizardry was happening, but everything was OK.
I tried changing my structure, changing tag (swapping a.area to p.area or without .area), HTML just said "nope, have those please".
Eventually I rewrote my own module out of frustration after three quarters of an hour fiddling with this stupid "module". I hate losing time for such shenanigans and under a lot of pressure because of deadlines.
Still haven't figured why those <element>.area would wrap everything out of nowhere...3 -
I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.
The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.
To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.
I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.
For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.
They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.
Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.
When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.
Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.
And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?
Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.
They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.
You can't make this stuff up.3 -
I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...
I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.
The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.
The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.
My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.
While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.
If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.
I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.
Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.4 -
... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.
so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.
BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.
and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.
and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.
autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.
in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.
upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.
at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.
remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.
it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...
it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.
and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.
it was a transcendental experience.
and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.
and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.
... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...3 -
Ok finally, I can tell now.
There's a college project I'm in with 2 more people that uses Python and AnyLogic (separately).
We also need to write some LaTeX, so as I was already using PyCharm for the Pyshit, I used it for the LaTeX and for Git.
I used it for Git too because I didn't know how it used Git and was worried that if I used the console it didn't recognize something or glitched out or something. And what the hell, it's a mature IDE, what could be so hard or possibly go wrong?
I had to re download the repo a couple of times because between pushes, pulls, merges and commits something happened and the repo ended in a weird state.
These are all the things I do:
Add, commit, create branches, merge, push, pull and delete branches.
So, I hadn't opened in some time. The last time I tried to bring something from another branch, and stayed up late to finish something. I was waiting for my classmates to join the call when I thought something like "Hey, I should commit what I did until now, it worked great.". When I examined the IDE I found out I was in the middle of a rebase or something. I start clicking buttons to at least try to commit. I press "Skip Commit". I lose everything.
What the fuck‽ As you can see in the comprehensive list above, I never do something similar to a rebase. Apparently when I tried to merge a couple of branches, the stupid IDE thought I tried to do a rebase and never asked me to finish it. Why do something I have never asked? Plus, why haven't you prompted me to finish the operation? That's so stupid. I'm never trusting IDEs again.
I was so lit for losing so many hours of work I did a couple of weeks before, I would have to think it and do it all over again because of something I never asked.
We spent an hour looking for a way to recover the lost code.
Why an hour, you ask, if you can use the Local History for that in PyCharm?
Because none of us had used it before and the articles we found said that you had to open it from the toolbar. From the toolbar it was greyed out.
Then I found the option in the contextual menu of the files. Recovered the LaTeX files but on the AnyLogic files, it was greyed out.
I had to open the Local History of the folder containing the AnyLogic file.
And that was that.
I almost faint.
Fuck Python, fuck PyCharm.8 -
So ok, today was a crazy day.
New sprint, new ticket.
Work on the bug tickets first he said ….
Sure can. Oh had I just known that this very first innocent looking ticket is the way to coder‘s hell ….
‚Access of undefined‘ it said. Easy to fix, I thought.
Until I found the very same code twenty-fucking-two times over about 50 files!
Who would guess that exportSingleOperatorBooking, exportSeveralOperatorBookings, exportAllOperatorBookings (… and more) could in practically be the same? Nah, they all use different interfaces.
Oh wait, the alias type of the extended sub-interface of file misc.ts is the same logical content as a differently named interface below another different interface with the same content as in another ts file?
Wait that can‘t be. Riiiiight?? 😳
8h later I have barely scratched the surface of refactoring this shitshow of a project.
But no, I refuse to put the same error handling multiple times in different places.
I could have been done already. I could have saved my soul, my sanity. But I will be brave and strong to save the innocent developer that will cometh after me. For I shall be rewardeth for my sacrifice.
Amen.8 -
Welcome to post 2 of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363374 It's title is: "Oh, you can post only every 2h. Didn't know that". I also didn't know that the rest of my rant would be put into a comment. For consistency tho, this time I am still splitting the story.
A wise person once wrote in their book: "People judge other people by two things: Empathy and competence." This may not be an accurate quote, but it carries the same message. Also, I don't really remember who was the author. I only know they were probably quite wise. Anyway, I just wanted to share that sentence. Have a moment and think about it. Or don't. Here's my story:
A was a software house that looked pretty promising. They were elegant, their page and offer looked nice. Well, unless you consider the fact that they offered me internship. Unpaid. But I decided to meet with them anyway, since I had hope that I could negotiate some sort of paid internship or a job contract even. I did my homework after all, and I was confident I am able to keep up with their requirements. I arrived a little bit... no, way to early. One damn hour. Whatever, I waited. I was greeted by a woman. We had a cultural conversation, she had a list of 12 questions I needed to answer, as a form of a test. We begun. First question: How do you change a value in Oracle Database? "Wait a minute", I thought, "What kind of question is that?". Why in seven hells would you want your frontend developer to know how to handle oracle db? Well, I gave my answer, I did lick some of that SQL in my life. Next question: Java stuff. The bloody gal didn't even care to check what position I am applying to before the interview! At this point I didn't really have very high hopes. A shame on them forever.
The story of B and C is connected and a little bit more complicated. More on that in part 2. B stands for Bank. A big corporation then, by definition. A person I know decided called me that day and told me they're hiring, that he referred me and that they would like to arrange a meeting. And so we did. It was couple of days before Christmas. C was a software house again. Or a startup. Idk really. Their website wasn't finished so I couldn't read anything useful up on them. They didn't tell me much about themselves either. They also started with "unpaid internship".
In C, they would greet me and instantly sit me down next to a mac laptop and told me, "hey, do this stuff in python". What the fuck, not again... I told them that I am frontend dev, they guy said "it's no problem, you said you know python, it's a simple task". And yeah, I did host some apps in Flask and I did use psycopg2. It was in my CV. But never, ever, have I mentioned knowing heuristics nor statistics. I'm no data scientist, monsieur. Whatever, I tried, I failed a little bit, I told them that maybe if I did want to spend half of my day there I would finish this task, but back then I was way too nervous to focus and code. I told them what should be done in code and that I just was unable to code this at the very moment. They nodded, we said goodbye and I was sure not to hear from them ever again.
In B, I was greeted by a senior frontend dev. He told me the recruiter is sick and he couldn't come, so we're talking alone. I can buy it. We sat down in said meeting room, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. No thx, I had digested so much caffeine during last 24h, next dose could be an overdose. And then, he took out my resume printed in paper. With notes on it. With some stuff encircled. That bloody bastard did his homework. We spent over an hour, just talking in friendly atmosphere. It was an interview, but it was a conversation also. We shared our experiences, opinions and it went just perfect.
On December 20, I was heading home for Christmas. My situation looked like this: A called me they could offer me only unpaid internship. I was getting kinda bored of rice and debts, tbh. I gracefully rejected their generous offer. B didn't give me feedback yet(it was a most recent interview, so I didn't expect any message until after Christmas anyway). C told me that they could give me internship, but I managed to convince them to make it paid internship. After three months of very bad times, things were starting to get better.
On part III we will explore further events of my very recent past. That post will be same amount of storytelling and possibly a lesson for those who seek an employer and for those who seek an employee.6 -
the one that exists (c#) seems underused compared to where it could (or even should) be used. and the place that uses it the most (enterprise) butchers and mangles its use, just as enterprise tends to do with everything.
the one that i'm designing... the fact that it doesn't exist yet, and that even as i'm zeroing in on syntax and philosophy that i'm very much starting to be proud of, i still don't have a proper idea of how to implement even the most basic parser/interpreter for it, not because it's in any way difficult or unusual, but just because... i've never done that before, so i get into weird circular thought paths that produce weird nonsensical code...
... on top of that, i still only have a very, very fuzzy idea of how will it (sometime in extremely distant future) actually implement the most interesting and core feature - event-based continuous (partial) re-parsing of the source code and the fact that traversing the tokens at the leaf level of the syntax tree should result in valid machine code (or at least assembly) that is the "compiled" program.
i *know* it's possible, i just don't yet know enough to have a contrete idea how exactly to achieve it.
but imagine - a programming language where interactive programming is basically the default way of working, and basically the same as normal programming in it, except the act of parsing is also the (in-memory) compilation at the same time, so it's running directly on the hardware instead of via interpretrer/vm/any of that overhead crap.
also then kinda open-source by definition.
and then to "only" write an OS in that, and voilá! a smalltalk-like environment with non-exotic, c-family syntax and actual native performance!
ahhh... <3
* a man can dream *2 -
Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.
I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)
I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)
Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design
Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz
Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.
20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..
For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)
After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)
I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone -
I freaking hate slow IDEs, especially ones made in Java.
I used to use an IDE/text editor called geany, and it was great, you could do almost every language in it and it worked great. It was fast, and efficient, it was a no-nonsense editor. That was when I was a kid, but I got in univ and got a job, so I had to start using big boy """""enterprise""""" IDEs like eclipse.
Eclipse, netbeans, and intellij (basically every Java based IDE except BlueJ) are exactly what is wrong with IDEs. They are clunky editors that frankly would be better off gone. They are slow, eat RAM like crazy (like most Java software). You just CANNOT have eclipse open for extended periods of time, because it WILL take up too much resources and get slow as heck. Android Studio (based on intellij) is a nightmare to work with. It just does not want to cooperate with you (I will agree they have improved a lot though).
I cannot believe I am saying this, but even the electron based IDEs like atom and code-oss are better than them. They are very easily expandable, something that Java was supposed to be, but is not. They have tons of plugins. Even if its not there, you can make one without having to spend a lifetime making the plugin! They look good. I never thought that going from IDEs with """""enterprise""""" UIs to something modern like code-oss would feel this great. Its ridiculous, I don't want to create a darn project for every single file that I want to edit, I just want syntax highlighting for a single .sh file that I want to edit right now. A project is just a way to logically define what is one "unit" or a "container for multiple files", you know what else is that? A simple directory.
Also I don't want 9 billion .xml files for the IDE to store its crap. Just make a .vscode like folder to hide your shit.11 -
so today was my physics exam(optics and optical devices) and this weird thing happened..
and before i get to tell you what happened , 2 months ago another set of examinations were going on and there is this attendance sheet that we have to fill up with a code provided on the answer sheet and signature. It has 2 columns(code and signature) and 5 rows(5 exams) and every student has his 5 rows unseparated by any space. So i filled the code and realized that i have filled it in the wrong area(last row of the guy before me). As it was first exam , i just cut it and thought its no big deal. In last exam ,this guy asks me "what have you done?" so i said its no big deal just write the code on the side. He said ok that was it(i thought)
now getting to what happened today, again it was our last exam , i got the attendance sheet and what do i see, this guy ahead of me filled up the code in my area and cut it. At first i thought ok maybe he was mistaken but then i realised that this is our last exam and we already have 4 signatures so how could he not see the difference between the signatures.
So he did that on purpose?
what kind of moron does that?
well maybe he felt delighted by doing this. idk too much weird for one day.1 -
I got a long weekend. I decided to see what React has been up to these days.
I happen to learn more about Suspense that now it allows f**king data fetching with relay.
I decided to give it a try . First time I am actually inclined towards trying out relay just so I can see what the f**king fuss about `Suspense` is all about.
Honestly the API is much better than what it looks like .
However what the fuck is this fucking relay. They have a page in their doc called glossary and most of the sections says TODO .
I wanted to see how the fuck data driven code splitting works . Due to the lack of proper documentation about it I could not get it right for two days . I stumbled upon couple of docs / blogs / github issues about it and then finally managed to get it working .
Well the end result wasn't as cool as I thought it would. The fucking API's to achieve this needless method of code splitting is insane
There are lot of better ways to achieve this with Suspense and the API relay offers is so shitty and not fucking type safe.
Now today I wanna learn more about the directives relay offers and there is no fucking documentation about them except for a fucking bold `TODO` explanation under the sections.
If relay developers thinks that they are fucking wizards and talk all about improving fucking performance . Please don't fucking over engineer API's and make it un un maintainable for the consumers of the library
Wow this feels good . first Day in rant and I m feeling great4 -
Not a fight per se, but I once had a debate with a tech lead who thought you could set a variable in the ‘then’ clause of a Javascript promise and just use said variable after the promise declaration and assume it would be populated.
“no.... thats not how asynchronous code works.”1 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
It was the end of my first week. Friday evening and everything was going well. I'd just made a career change and loved it. My new job, boss, and coworkers were fantastic.
So I decided to play a little with a portion of the website before leaving for the weekend. I needed to learn a module that was responsible for displaying our company hours online. I was told prior to being hired that this particular part of the site was important and the only recent cause of the previous developer working long hours.
It didn't work like I thought it did, and with changing one line of code, I brought the entire thing to it's knees. Not just the part displaying hours, but the entire page, which was our home page.
I didn't panic. I called some other devs I had met. I knew they could fix it. No one answered. 4.30pm on a Friday is not the best time to reach people. Four or five unanswered calls later, I started to panic. I tried changing the line of code back, but couldn't get it right. I tired removing the hours module, but that didn't work either. 10 minutes felt like an eternity.
I finally found the history feature of our CMS. It saves versions of pages and saved me that night. I rolled back to a version of the page last modified before I started working there, and it worked like a charm.
I didn't touch that module again until I had something to replace it with.3 -
I hate it when I am looking online at someone else's code where they thought they could just paste 50+ lines of code with no formatting! Or even worse, the sites desktop app has formatting, but on mobile, the app just smashes everything together. Does anyone else have this problem?
-
May's last week was very hectic. I had just finished my final exams and there were going to be semester project evaluations in that whole week.
@safiullah and me had decided to make a whole Social Network with all features in it, for the DB course project.
All other classmates were making small management systems like ticket booking and etc.
We thought that if we really wanted to learn DB concepts then we should come up with something different than a management panel.
Hence we did it. This was the first time we used a framework. Well, I had written that PHP framework while i was learning about how frameworks work and the way they are made. So it wasn't a big thing but it was something which could be used as a base for clean and organized code.
It took about a month of commits and pushes and it resulted in a very good social network. It had all the features and algorithms present in a starter social network.
For us students, we were happy to see what a fine job we had done. We learnt a lot and used new concepts.
When we went to the instructor, she asked us to sit down and show the project. @safiullah placed the laptop, and logged out from the social network so that he could show her a demo.
She exclaimed,"Why did you do it (Log out) ?"
He replied: "To show you how it works🤷🏻♂️"
She:"Get to the previous state and leave it"
Then she asked different questions like what was a post request in php and how it differed from get? what library for DB connection was used... etc.
We explained each and every step.
She saw the frontend design and said "You've just added text to the elements" as If we were showing her a theme demo with hard coded text accomplished by inspect element.
She did not take a look at any other page than the one we had shown her at start. She navigated to no other page and asked nothing about what total features were implemented and how they were done?
Then she said Thank You and we left.
After some days marks were uploaded in LMS and we were just two points above the average.
She took no look and gave us the least when our project was the best.
I'm 100 percent sure she thought that we were showing her a project copied from somewhere else. 🤣4 -
Do you guys ever wake up early shaking with cortisol thinking about code? I woke up super early bc my anxious ass brain thought I had to have an implementation plan and architecture setup for my dreams before I could truly stay asleep4
-
!rant but tips
TL;DR consistent commitments form a habit.
I didn't write any code or do any major tasks past 5 days. Rest at home 2 days and went to short trip for remaining. Answered a few business calls. Made few important calls. Didn't bring my laptop with me and used my gf's one for less than 2 hours. (Majority of that 2 hours was spent on changing her W10 Japanese display language into English.)
This morning I found it hard to gain the productivity and concentration I had past few months. I thought I have lost it and got back to my old lazy 🐒 self.
Couldn't able to touch, well didn't have the mood to touch to be precise, my major tasks. I did my best to sit at my desk and finish minor small tasks that I can find the whole morning. That's the best I could do and probably the wise one I did.
After lunch time around 2pm, I gained my concentration back. I worked on my major tasks till 7pm. And now going home happy.
So my "productivity-is-a-lot-like-intercourse" analogy belief became stronger. As long as I commit to my desk and keep my work routine, I won't be losing my concentration and productivity for a long period. -
Well fuck. I am experiencing over-engineering first hand.
I am the single dev responsible for developing a small feature but which is an identity to our whole product(feel free to guess it here). This is quite simple I thought, I can just modify the constants which are being used in the source code and I can finish it off in a week tops. I asked all the relevant teams over which this feature would have dependencies and they gave me a green signal. Setup Jenkins configuration and everything for this new feature. With a wide grin on my face, I sent out a pull request. Now the architect of our product declined the pr saying to change everything from the bottom up giving the reason that it would be configurable sometime later in the future. Now mind you, I get it if this feature could change over time and needs customability. But it has been the same since last seven years and would probably not change again for a couple of years ahead [you have to take my word for it.]. Its not that the guy is a douche or anything, he is one of the best dev I have ever personally came across and I highly respect and admire him. But there has to be a trade off between the effort you are putting in versus the benefit you get. Now I have to touch almost every file, super carefully look in the whole product if a bug creeps out from anywhere and change the existing code to a point where it doesn't even make sense to me anymore, and write tests ofcourse.
wubba lubba dub dub!2 -
Hello ranters, I'm looking for advice in regards to a freelancing job which I haven't been paid.
In summary, I got a freelancing job in like March 2018, I had to do a simple platform with an administrator section, simple but "long", it had to be fully customizable, so I did it. I then got another project, which I also finished, both by December. I added some functionality not on the requirements and also some other asked by them, I also deployed both of them, tasks not included on the "contract". The problem is that I didn't sign a contract (my fault), it was all verbal. Since I was "friends" with them, I asked them to pay me with a motorbike (of around 2300 USD) and they agreed. Then they gave me another project which started wrong, they asked me to finish it within two weeks with a language I didn't know and other tools I also didn't know, I told them about this and agreed that could be a delay, besides, the requirements weren't totally clear and they were clarified three days after the project "started". After this, we had a discussion about how I later realized I was totally underpriced, that I hadn't been paid yet and how the dude that was like my main contact for the project told me that "my code was all nice and cool but was useless" because he clearly thought that an excel could be used as a database and din't know that I had to parse it and upload it to Firebase, which in total were about 4 million documents and this obviously took time. To not make it longer, I delivered the project 1 week later and they told me that they had to "assign" a full team of 7 members to do it from zero because I didn't deliver it on time and because when he asked me to "help them" I laughed. I first delivered like the 90%~95% of the project and he was been condescendent, he also blocked me from everywhere (hangouts, slack) and told me to "deliver what I had" to at least have something to prove that I did work. His team of "7 members" was stupid enough to not be able to at least run an npm install and npm run, they were also stupid enought to not understand what a GET request was an all and when he realized this, he asked me for the database dump and for the 100% of the project, so I also delivered it. We agreed that we were not going to work together anymore, so I asked him to pay me at least what had to be paid of the other two projects and he agreed, he also purchased a computer for me which I was paying him and was going to be discounted from the total payment. In the end, I was going to be paid 1430 USD. He asked me for my bank account and like my tax ID, for whatever he needed it. Since then, almost two weeks, he hasn't paid me, replied or even seen my messages. He also had a "partner" which was also "my friend", the huge motherfucker isn't even replying my mails or anything, so, since it was all verbal and they are being such motherfuckers, I don't know what to do. They are being such motherfuckers and I think I can't proceed legally, since there is no written contract. So what should I do? I was planning on going tomorrow but I pretty sure they won't even open the door or will tell me to wait or whatever. I seriously wanna cry, I don't get how people can be such dicks and unfair fuckers. I believe in karma but I don't think karma will give me that money and time back. :(11 -
TLDR: I wanted to change email to new one, but I could not remember which one I have
currently. I found out an API in DevRant JS files for email verification and used
it to find it out.
So, I am moving from Gmail to Protonmail Pro, absolutely love their service.
I wanted to do same on Devrant but I could not figure out my current mail for
"I lost my password" form. My Password Manager have only login saved, and profile does
not show email address.
I thought that this user information is stored on server so it have to be some way to retrieve it. I dug
in source code and I've found:
`<div class="signup-title">Verify Your Email</div>`
Which has event assigned to function which uses jQuery.ajax (love it btw :D) to call:
`url: "/api/users/me/resend-confirm",`
This seems like worth a shot. Few copy-pastes and one ajax call later:
*Ding*
From: support@devrant.io
To: dawid@dawidgoslawski.pl
"Welcome to Devrant"
Got it :) So I have already changed in march when DevRant on previous layout.
This is what I love in this profession - problem solving. AI will not replace human
in any way, we will just stop coding array iterations and data manipulation - we will focus
on real problem solving and human touch (like design, convincing management for changes).1 -
Well... I guess I started learning how to program so many years back when I thought I could fix my girlfriend's mood swings with code. Guess what: we are married now and I'm still learning how to program!2
-
Incoming rant.
I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?
I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.
I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.
Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.
I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.
I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.
I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.
I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.
This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.1 -
I finally got to code something yesterday (I've been slacking OTL everytime I open the Java IDE I use my motivation flies out the window) and I've written down some things to help me do what I need because I forget it if I keep it all in my head. Not that this is a big thing, but it's just to help me to not forget what I've learnt, because I know that'll happen if I don't code.
So I'm coding and checking my notes and all, headphones on, heavy metal blasting, I guess I could say I was in the zone.
Suddenly I get a message from my dad asking me to come to the living room. Turns out my mom had been calling me but I couldn't hear it because I had the headphones on... again 😅 (Sorry mom 😇)
So I left my things and walked to the living room. My mom wanted me to put 2 images I've made for her together. I sat on the couch and waited. And waited. I waited more than I've coded before they called me. I was getting impatient because I was trying to code and I'd been called to wait ;u; I thought I could do it in her computer because it was a simple paint thing so I didn't need the editing program I use.
When she finally showed me what she wanted me to do and I noticed that I hadn't edited one the image she provided me correctly (it didn't look good either way, I butchered the logo she'd given me because stray pixels are a thing that exist 😒 reducing the image also kinda killed it 😅). So I come back to my room and edited it again and made it look a bit better, did what she wanted me to do in the first place and emailed it to her. I went back to the living room and checked it it was good and went back.
I lost too much time and the motivation to code. Played for a bit and then forced myself to go back to coding because I didn't feel motivated (not that I don't like coding, I just lack the motivation most of the time). When I realized it it was 2h30 am and I was getting tired 😴2 -
Most fun I had coding?
I was developing my first android app and the database accounted for all the weekdays.
It was a night and I was coding. I build the app after 90 minutes of last build. I was fucking amazed to see that my app was running perfectly on Genymotion Emulator whilst the same god damn build crashed on my phone.
As a new novice developer, I thought it could be due to the OS version difference b/w my phone and VB.
I went on to spent an hour or so, to figure out where I had gone wrong. I re-read my code multiple times and nothing. I could not find a single error in the code.
I was fucking speachless when it hit me, FUCK, today is Saturday (last build was around 11PM Friday) and VM's time is usually screwed (it was Wednesday there) and since I had not accounted for weedends entry in database, the app crashed.
It was really fun having this sort of a bug for the first time in my life. Solved it within minutes after that. -
So I'm on one project which was previously developed (I mean poorly developed) by another firm.
So this fucking guy who has done all the coding, I just fucking hate that guy because he has the shittiest logic and he doesn't know things should always be dynamic.
So he has written code(in PHP) where he has calculated the difference between DateTime and he is adding days, hours and minutes to another DateTime.
And it took me fucking 5hours to realize that he just forgot there is a thing called month which should be considered while doing this, I mean WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
It was calculating like the difference between
2018-07-12 and 2018-09-18 are FUCKING 6 DAYS WTF!!!! SERIOUSLY? HOW COULD SOMEONE MISS THIS?WTF?!!!! FUCKING 5 HOURS FOR THIS?
Hush!! I think it is my bad that I thought it is DateTime issue and focused on that. I feel good now. Thanks.1 -
Just learned that you can join a network through a QR code. That's sick!
I thought you could only go to links / store plain text with QRs...19 -
My thought process..
a compiler found a type error, oh thank god i was not using python or even worse js. this could have been hard debug error, type do matter huh!. what if compiler was even strict that could have found more error and i could really write even safe code. Ohh may be i should learn/finish Rust
** suddenly conscious slaps in the face**
first finish one project, STOP language hopping ..
Oh! right!1 -
So today I thought I’ll try svelte. It was an horrible experience if I compare it to stencil.
I have to install four extensions just to make the file format working properly.
Half of the intellisense is wrong or just slow.
The formatter is not integrated as an vs-code formatter, therefor it can’t format on save automatically.
The source maps do indeed work, but is quite wonky at times. Typescript source code is shown as-is with types, which breaks chrome’s syntax highlighter.
Personally, I dislike template languages simply because I always have to look at the docs for the correct usage, just let me use the stuff I know from JavaScript!
I could also rant about a few small things like the on:something syntax, but eh, that’s it for now. I don’t think I’ll understand why so many like it.3 -
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.8 -
TLDR: RTFM...
My dad (taught me how to code when I was a kid) was stuck serializing a Java enum/class to XML.... The enum wasn't just a list of string values but more like a Map(String,Object>.
He tried to annotate it with XMLEnum but the moment I saw this enum, I'm thinking that's unlikely to work.... Mapping all that to just a string?
He tried annotating the Fields in it using XMLAttribute but clearly wasnt working...
Also he use XMLEnumValue but from his test run I could clearly see it just replaced whatever the enum value would've been with some fixed String...
Me: Did you read the documentation or when the javadocs?
Dad: no, I don't like reading documentation and the samples didn't work.
I haven't done XML Serialization for years thought did use JSON and my first instinct was... You need a TypeAdapter to convert the enum to a serializable class.
So I do some Googling, read the docs then just played around with the code, figured out how to serialize a class and also how to implement XmlTypeAdapter.... 20 mins ...
Text him back with screenshots and basically:
See it's not that hard if you actually read up on the javadocs and realized ur enum is more like a class so probably the simple way won't work...2 -
I haven't written serious code in 3 months. By serious I mean I haven't thought a lot about a problem or developed something difficult to develop.
Also I have avoided coding whenever I could.
I did that after a friends' advice as they saw me burned out for real and quite sad at the time.
Honestly, I feel much better emotionally and my overall mood has much less tension. Gonna start coding for real soon after getting that out of my system. -
Hi all,
I'm in this company for about 15 months. It's one of the big name company. I'm a senior dev here. In my team we follow agile development. In starting I was just working on my part mostly. Then my manager raised concern to me for not taking ownership and helping others.
I started doing things what I could do. Like code review, API discussion, design discussion etc..
Now, the thing is I usually get upset when people go with 'lazy' solutions because I feel bad design leads to maintenance overhead, and it happened to us in past. We had to spend weekends to make things work. So, I started making code review, design review strict.
Some people didn't like it. But my manager was supportive, or at least I think so.
Some days back manager took me in a one-o-one discussion and told me one of the colleague kinda complained against me.
Now, my manager is not involving me into design discussions and API discussions. There are some new features are coming and I am not informed. I get to know things only in scrum-updates.
Am I about to get fired? I'm not gonna lie, I'm so scared. I can't put down papers as I'm already into 4th company in 7 years.
This thought is just killing me. What should I do? I'm so alone.7 -
Next job I find has to be entertaining somewhat. I thought I could deal with boring work but I'm tired of it.I It's just so damn boring. I'm not even writing new code anymore, I'm just updating dependency versioning and restructuring tests. It's bumming me out seriously. The mental fatigue from struggling to keep my eyes open every day leaves me struggling to get out of bed in the morning.6
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I was teaching my friends to code in HTML with Atom earlier today so we could finish the homework for a class and in the span of one hour, two kids randomly approached us and started staring at the screen. They thought we were coding something huge when in reality we were practicing our ordered and unordered lists. Lmfao2
-
Just made a damn fool of myself with a client. I handed off three projects and they had no idea what they were for and neither did I. My boss gave me these months ago. No code comments, no documentation, just some stored procedures they wanted me to actualize.
The best I could offer was to promise the client I would send a description of the projects to them as soon as my boss gets them to me. Fuck. I thought the client would know what they asked for when I showed them, but fuck me, they didn't remember. So embarrassing. 😡😡😡 -
I just started a new job where in my onboarding, I’m supposed to learn typescript and react. I am also supposed to gain some knowledge of databases. Since I am so new, I don’t really have any meetings. I see my manager maybe 2x a day. I’ve been using my time at work to learn these technologies.
I learn best by doing projects. I recently built a bot that scrapes media off of one site and posts it on another site. I was thinking I could create a react front end in typescript for the bit. I would also add a database to my project (the model for the front end) which contains the post history of the bot.
Would that be appropriate for work? I thought it would be good project to help me learn react. However, I am new to the “corporate” world and I feel like my manager won’t want me to waste company time on my side project.
The only other responsibilities I have are reviewing the source code and watching some onboarding videos6 -
grrrr
last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure
my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks
so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao
walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt
got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.
walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe
so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator
yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?
... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...
fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT
I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch4 -
Today I was meeting with a researcher in my department so that I could show him how the software I developed works. He graduated from a really good university in electronic engineering, with 100/100 I think, and he can manage to copy&paste some python code. So I didn't expect what happened today.
Guy: 'So I have to give to your program as input this python file which contains a function you need to call, right?'
Me: 'Yep, I mean, that is a jupyter notebook, I need a text file containing only the function which is in that notebook'
Guy: *Downloads the notebook, tries to feed the notebook file into my program*
Me: 'Wait, don't, there probably is a lot of junk related to jupyter notebook, try opening it in notepad++'
Guy: *Opens file, sees a lot of junk text*
Me: 'Yeah, I thought so, you need to save it as plain text or .py'
Guy: *Renames the notebook as .txt*
Me: *Shakes my head without him noticing*
'That won't work, the content of the file won't change like that...' -
I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
Salt is awesome, no questions about that. YAML is giving me headaches, but it's my fault and eventually I'll get used to it. But this being my first encounter with jinja, WHO THE HELL THOUGHT THIS PIECE OF CRAP DESERVES TO LIVE! Instead of writing python inside {% %} you have to write kinda pseudo python and I just spend over hour trying to build list inside for. Yes, great idea, scoping fors, and lets make it hard to escape scoping, beacause it would be a shame if somebody COULD ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING USEFULL. I though several times of using different renderer, but I want to keep my code readable and mainrainable and in the end I found a workaround, but still, Jinja, YOU SUCK!4
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I had an idea for an open source project, but wanted to get some feedback before I committed a lot of time and energy to it. Seeing as how devRant is the only social media type app I use, I thought this would be a good place to ask.
The project would be an open source keyboard for iOS that would make it easier for devs to write code on their mobile devices. There's already a few "developer" keyboards, but they're either paid apps, or haven't been updated in a while.
Creating a custom keyboard isn't very complex, so it could be a good place for newer devs to actually contribute code and get comfortable with open source in general.
So my question is, do people use third party keyboards? Is this something people would be interested in contributing to? Should I go back to the drawing board?3 -
That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.
And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?
"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.
"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.
"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.
What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?
What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?
What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?
What if you've used more languages than you can remember?
What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?
What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.
What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?3 -
Fuck you Linux! I thought user password validation would be a piece of cake, like bash one liner. How wrong could I be!
Yeah, it's already ugly to grep hash and salt from /etc/shadow, but I could accept that. But then give me a friggin' tool to generate the hash. And of course the distro I chose has the wrong makepswd, OpenSSL is too old to have the new SHA-512 built in, as it should be a minimal installation I don't want to use perl or python...
And the stupid crypto function that would do me the job is even included in glibc. So it's only one line of C-code to give me all I want, but there is no package that would provide me this dull binary? Instead I will have to compile it myself and then again remove the compiler to keep image small?5 -
Me and my friends decided to start a film company, much like roosterteeth. Throughout high school we had a talented group, actors, musicians, writers etc and those of us behind the scenes editing and shooting footage, graphic design and web development. My best friends passion is film, he's a good director and editor and wanted to start this company and was blessed enough to have a group of friends with all of these talents.
Naturally I was the teams web developer/designer.
Well this morning he texts me saying he's sending an old friend of ours my way to help on the website. My first thought is "why?". I code alone, I've never made a website as a team, that just seems like a mess.
Well the friend of ours texts me shortly after saying he was LEARNING to code and wanted to know if he could be in the dev team. I am the dev team. It's not a group to be joined. I don't want my first team experience to be one where I'll have to be teaching along the way, bc I may as well do it alone at that point. I haven't responded to either person yet as I was waiting to share with devRant 😂3 -
devRanters!
Do any of you find that you can type the solution faster than GitHub Copilot recommends?
That's how you know you're senior 😏
Also, on a serious note, does it only support JavaScript / TypeScript? Didn't really take time to investigate.
I thought there was also a feature you could tell it what to code and it would try to write a solution. Haven't really seen how to do that yet.7 -
One year ago I graduated from university college,
Thought I had a stack overflowing with knowledge.
How wrong can one man be?
Very wrong, apparently...
Even though I only had a bachelor degree,
I landed a job at a nearby company.
Today I'm maintaining the code I wrote back then,
Seriously wondering if I could just write it all again.
The code I wrote I would consider a crime,
But it's good to see improvement over such a short time.
I still dread coming back to this code in another year,
Thinking yet again; "What the hell went wrong here?".2 -
I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.
So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.
To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.
So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.
I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?
So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…
His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)
(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)
Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?
Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.
Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?
Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.
So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .
Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter” -
Built the most generic file importer.
So a customer had his SAP system giving us some 5 million barcodes in a csv which we needed to parse. But as there could be different file types and I thought the handling would always include the same steps I made them configurable through function pointers. - Did not want to make it as spooky as the rest of the code base where the function pointers were buried deep in some shared memory configs, which might even change at run time, but rather I statically used the member functions of my class. Just to poke fun on the ugly C++ syntax of member function pointers. I still shudder at the thought some poor soul now has to maintain that code.
(For the actual parsing I actually used a one liner in awk which was churning through the records in one minute which was faster than the SAP guys seemed to be accustomed to.) -
I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.
I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...
At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.
This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.
So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.
Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.
I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.
It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.
I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).
We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.
I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.
But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.
So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.
So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.
Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:
- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.
- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.
So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.
So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.
I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.
I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.
After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time. -
Someone mentioned antivirus and custom code... it reminded me of when Symantec Endpoint Protection received an update and some of our production servers had our custom apps quarantined. We had about four servers that had most of our custom apps removed. When it happened I thought someone was monkeying with the servers (they were our task servers used for task and service jobs). It took me about an hour to realize what happened then another hour to get the SEP admins to disable it until we could get another patch. Fun day.
-
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.1 -
At my first job, I was in test automation. For a major new complicated feature, I was the test lead and its final stages coincided with a company trip to Israel. I got to sit side by side with its lead developer and he went over all his code and database changes with me. He kept stopping because I guess I had that deer in headlights expression and he thought he was boring me. Actually I was just in awe. He was so proud of his work on it and had every right to be. It was so cool of him to take an hour or two and break it down for me like that.
He told me he wanted to make sure I understood all the pieces involved so I could test more and he could release a rock solid new feature. -
Okay..
So, what do I have here?
A cross platform mobile app with NO unit tests.
😕
I have to write a big new feature from scratch. (Things can't go wrong, right?)
Started working on it, pointed out problems with the UI/UX designs. The design changed multiple times, still I thought I could finish it by the expected date. And, so I did.
The feature went through testing, and they found bugs. (Surprise...?)
It's already kinda scary to touch someone's code that has no unit tests and no comments. And I think, it's all the more difficult to not introduce bugs.
Also, had to work on the weekend to fix the bugs.
I had some good learnings here, but I'm not sure how I can prevent bugs without unit tests and proper feedback cycle. :/4 -
I had to import some resources into infrastructure-as-code ( IaC ) for a new project. I found the right tool for the job and started working on it.
But I had a lot of resources to import. I decided to use the API of the source provider and transform them into the configuration format required for the IaC tool.
After spending a good half of a day scripting with a combination of `jq` and `yq` and another bunch of tools, I finally completed the import yesterday.
Today, I had to refer to the documentation of the IaC tool for something else and I found that there was a built-in command for pulling resources from the target to the source ( basically what I did with my script ). 🤦
( I hope my manager doesn't find out that I 'wasted' half a day when I could have completed the job within around an hour )
Lesson learnt the hard way ( again ) : READ THE F**KING MANUAL even if it may seem trivial.
*thought to self* : YTF won't you learn this simple thing after so many incidents? RTFM! -
So I’m taking a class on compilers (currently a college student) and as I get further into a coding project we have to do I can feel and see my code degrading into a giant mass of spaghetti. Although I know that I should refactor it because it is messy (currently trying to find a balance between refactoring and actually getting the assignment done) the scary thing is some students in my class think this is perfectly normal code and is what good code looks like. Scary thought that so many people graduating from university have no concept of object orientation, reusability, etc... but what’s even scarier is most professors could not give two shits about any of these notions. I guess this is the biggest reason why a computer science degree does not prepare you for a job in industry.
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After completing the startup, all about api calls;
Supabase as server, netlify calls for storing data into supab, some frontend and stripe as payment method, using webhooks to do some logic behind,
I never thought that I could finish it, now I'm answering questions on Quora about it and doing content for it. Feels odd and want to code AGAIN!2 -
In my college project I am stuck with dumbos. I thought because of of experience in industry I would make them learn something. They don't anything other data entry, a lot of which can be automated. And I work the code which involves building APIs and 2 different Android apps. They are 3 and I am one. Till today they never bother to install the dev environment. Today I told them to get their laptops so they could connect to my laptop server and work with it. But no one bothered to get their laptops. All of them were using my one laptop. Can you imagine 3 people sitting on one machine instead of 3. And I have to sit there doing nothing😑. I went out to chill for sometime knowing that I could do nothing useful without my laptop. And when I return I find that instead of adding new entries, these people kept on editing old entries.🤦🏻 I mean how dumb could anyone be. Power of 3 brains. I can handle 0 work done, but this is negative work. I could done it myself by writing some automation script. And these people tell people behind my back to my friends that they do all the work😡. I have reached the limits.2
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So I already posted about this a couple of months ago, but I'm still working on my little game, Lore Seeker.
https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/...
I added a bunch of stuff - cards are now divided into 4 factions, and I added a whole slew of different abilities. It's getting pretty close to what I envisioned when I started imo. I also ported it from iPhone to Mac Os X, so if you have a mac you can do me a huge favor by checking it out and giving me a rating! I don't think the mac os app store gets any traffic though.
I have no idea if anyone actually wants to play this thing even if I add a million levels/cards but I'm just continuing to work on it and improving it hoping someone will notice eventually.
The most common question I get seems to be "where's android", so I've been messing around with android studio trying to figure out the basics. I have a tiny platform layer of Swift code that doesn't do much, and most of my code is in C++. So I just need to learn how to embed C++ code and then duplicate a small platform layer. I thought I could just jump into that and 'wing it' but I'm starting to think I will have to actually do some studying to figure out how android works... seems pretty confusing so far.
Anyway, thanks for any comments / advice / disses! <3334 -
Recently joined new Android app (product) based project & got source code of existing prod app version.
Product source code must be easy to understand so that it could be supported for long term. In contrast to that, existing source structure is much difficult to understand.
Package structure is flat only 3 packages ui, service, utils. No module based grouped classes.
No memory release is done. So on each screen launch new memory leaks keep going on & on.
Too much duplication of code. Some lazy developer in the past had not even made wrappers to avoid direct usage of core classes like Shared Preference etc. So at each place same 4-5 lines were written.
Too much if-else ladders (4-5 blocks) & unnecessary repetitions of outer if condition in inner if condition. It looks like the owner of this nested if block implementation has trust issues, like that person thought computer 'forgets' about outer if when inside inner if.
Too much misuse of broadcast receiver to track activities' state in the era of activity, apપ life cycle related Android library.
Sometimes I think why people waste soooo... much efforts in the wrong direction & why can't just use library?!!
These things are found without even deep diving into the code, I don't know how much horrific things may come out of the closet.
This same app is being used by many companies in many different fields like banking, finance, insurance, govt. agencies etc.
Sometimes I surprise how this source passed review & reached the production. -
How do all you other devs deal with sleep? Because I am losing my fucking mind I work for myself so I don't go to work at 9am leave at 6pm.
I normally work until 6am and then sleep till 12 drink 3 strong coffee to start functioning again try and do something productive which at the moment involves catching up on the NBA playoffs and then starting work at 6pm.
Due to resent baby I thought shit my life is fucked I haven't left the house in 3 days I need structure routine I need to work 9am to 6pm become human again but I just can't FUCKING sleep it's now 1:30am and I'm trying to sleep.
I know what your thinking why are you on devRant but I've been trying to sleep for the past 3 hours but all I can think about is work code, refactoring, new languages, security, support shit that can wait but I can't get it out my head, keep thinking "ah your not tired you could work", and YES I have a list which get bigger every day wish I had a drug dealer or was still in contact with my old mates so I could get some Valium but it's hot milk and sleeping tablets for me, life is so much easier when you can just fuck of home at the end of the day and forget about work, not having your laptop next to you trying to trick you into opening it. How do other people who work for theirselves deal with the life work balance?4 -
Looking for a recommendation on what I should use to code on my phone.
I own an iPhone and usually spend a lot of time on public transit. I thought that it would be better to spend that time coding or learning something new. I am semi experienced in programming and this would help me get better as well.
Any recommendations on any app (possibly free) that I could download to kinda allow me to code and learn at the same time?5 -
Use case for AI I haven't seen and would like to: New tech teacher / guide.
Example: I am using some stuff that uses twig internally (a PHP template engine), so I got curious and checked it out.
Looks cool and all, but if I wanted to do some simple PoC I thought it would take a lot of reading, searching and trying.
How cool would it be to have an AI that I could ask about doing something and it would teach me the necessary twig concepts I need, and as I keep exploring it remembers what it told me and builds on that to introduce the new concepts. It could check my code to see if I got it too.
Wouldn't it be nice? But now I put it into words I don't know exactly if it's possible. 👀 Wdyt?9 -
OpenSource is fun they said. I being a bored teen thought, ah, another chance to experiment. Discover something new. Now I am into piracy, movies, music, software. If I can get it for free I ain't paying for it. So I went on to GitHub to see what exciting new Repos I could contribute to. I hate already implemented plenty of algorithms in GO for GitHub.com/TheAlgorithms so I was looking something more practical, more beneficial to society. Then I saw it, the perfect repo, not too complex and not amateur. SpotDL/spotify-downloader for downloading songs from Spotify, a grey area coz it's technically piracy. Well not from Spotify, we fetch the info from the Spotify API and search for the songs on YouTubeMusic. They were just about to release v3, a complete rewrite of the codebase stressing code readability and stuff. I spend about a day studying the codebase, trying to findout just where I could make my contribution. I can see outright that there's a huge problem with implementation.
First of all the script spawns 4 processes for downloading songs though you might be downloading only one song. Which means for everytime you run the script you have to wait for 4 other processes to be spawned before any downloading can happen. Sure this is faster when you are downloading more than like 4 songs, but it's actually slower when downloading a single song. But I ignored that coz I assumed that most users download playlists and albums. Anyway we talked with the like lead developer and he was all like, make those PRs anytime you feel like. So I made a really minor first contribution.
I introduced download from Spotify URI functionality, modified like 10 lines of code. I was half expecting that the PR would be merged within hours at most 24 hours coz of how minor of a contribution it was, 5 days in it was pending. So I tagged the lead Dev and he was all appreciative of the PR, calling it real 'clean code' and stuff. 3 more days, the PR is still not merged. I have now stacked 4 more commits to the same PR, I tag the dev and he's like he's waiting to see if my 'feature' will get atleast 10 upvotes so that it can be merged, he links an issue. I go to the issue and my feature is not there, So 11 days after I made my PR I have to write a comment explaining the 'feature' introduced in my PR and then wait for 10 upvotes.
I was like f**k this, I'll just develop on my fork if you want the features on my fork, you will make your own PR! I am so done with OpenSource, development is slow. I have no idea how you guys do it. I can't handle development where I don't have write access.7 -
udemy.com/java-tutorial
I had some very minimal experience with Arduino and Zelio, so I guess I had the basic notions in the back of my mind, but this is where it all begun.
I was asked if I wanted to learn how to code because they needed a developer, so I chose Java because I liked Minecraft and I thought that if I failed, at least I could code some mods.
Spoiler alert: I didn't fail so I didn't have time to code mods... is it really not have failed? -
Hell, I always thought I was a team player, but is it a great week being the sole developer (all the other on vacation). So I didn't get interrupted all the time, read overblown PR. Still, even in their absence I spent about three days fixing their build issues and PR's, but I could sit down and read the code, some documentation to get a better understanding why it all sucks and what we should do with our pain in the ass build system.
It's really a blast, deleting some stupid code, removing superfluous dependencies and above all leaving snarky remarks in the commit messages and code comments. Just letting some steam off. Code is where my devrant is. -
You know
When I first saw etherum talking about am distributed state machine i thought wow. Not very practical but NEAT. I envisioned being able to make a byte code that could be stored in transactions and run by individual clients in an async function and each step of the resulting execution and the values of managed ram would be stored at intervals so other clients could take over and execute a few more statements and compare what should always be expected results that are identical
A grand incredibly inefficient system however really neato from the theoretical computer nerd standpoint !
Boy was I disappointed lol all it is a basic contracts language but yet they state it could be like a word computer ! How ? I thought maybe if you had enough nodes participating maybe you could store registers and the like in transaction values ? Wouldn’t that be the way ?
Seems like as a word computer they’re stuck somewhere between very simplistic js and something prior to amptron in usability yet they advertised as a world computer
Am i missing something ? I mean you could create something that would translate higher level code into smal numeric statements and then send it additions values but what would it be useful for and how would you actually. Store anything ?