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

Me: "We should remove that popup"

Marketer: "But our A/B testing statistics show a 14% increase in signups to our newsletter, and people who get our newsletter are 4% more likely to buy something"

Me: "0.14x0.04... so slightly more than half a percent improvement. And you also qualitatively measured how many people decide to never visit the page again, just because of that popup? Did you measure the how many internet users with adblockers run into a broken webpage? Did you measure the amount of emails to support from users who can't unsubscribe from the newsletter because there is no unsubscribe link?"

Marketer: "Why would they want to unsubscribe? The newsletter adds value to our users!"

Me: 😩

I work at a small company that uses very outdated coding approaches for their solutions.

About a year ago I went through our main application to improve performance and found quite a few areas that I could tackle such as using a dictionary data structure in place of (many) foreach loops that required to pull out a single object.

That specific change yielded a lot of improvement (you can only imagine) and the other developers wanted to learn the ways of dictionaries (because it was so revolutionary and new to them). I showed them many examples so that they could better understand this data structure.

Fast forward to a few months later, saw one of my coworker's code and noticed that they were using a dictionary... And iterating through each kvp similar to a foreach..... Wtf?!

P.S. that person's salary is much higher than mine :(

First time rant. Thanks for listening!

I really think DevRant should change "Comment" buttons to "//" or "/**/", or something in that fashion. That would fit well with the increments and decrements :)

When you're trying to optimize a process and a team members gets upset because "that's not the way we've done it before!"

No fuck. That's why we are fucking improving it.

Huge code improvements

Clickbait will never change.
It's the most stable and constant source of mild annoyance.

2019 internet:

"These 3 programming languages will net you the highest salary"
"Ten home improvement tips using nothing but recycled underwear"
"How to cut onions like a real chef"

2020 internet:

"3 programming languages to learn while being bored in self-quarantine"
"Ten ways to use underwear as facemasks during the pandemic"
"Onions might cure corona, click here to learn how to cut them"

2030 internet:

"These 3 programming languages will increase your chances of survival in the wastelands"
"Ten ways to patch up your shelter against radioactive ashes using old underpants"
"Hydroponic onions are a good source of nutrients. Here's how you cut them with your camping knife"

I just made my first pull request to an open source repo on github 😊

Just some tiny improvement but still I'm geeking out right now🤓

Boss: Great news, we are getting another backend dev from another team to help us out.

Me: Cool, hopefully we don’t have the same trouble as the others, not replying, never writing anything down etc.

Boss: No, I’ve worked with her before. She’s much more passionate about doing things right, using best practices and all that stuff.

Me: Oh that’s perfect, great news!

Boss: Yep! ... just be aware she has a tendency to get very easily confused. She delivers the wrong thing from time to time and might need to redo stuff semi-regularly.

Me: ... ... ...

Boss: It’ll all work out. Don’t worry. Ok gotta run.

Manager: The site I loading too slow. How can we improve this?

Me: *f5 & look at the network log* the server is taking too long to respond some image requests. We could encode them into the Html to have them all delivered in a single request.

Manager: GTMetrix says we need to compress the images.

Me: *reads GTMetrix report* we would only have a 150kb improvement. It won't even be noticeable.

Manager: If the images take a long time to load, it means that they're too big, right?

Me: or the server is taking a long time to respond our request for them, which is the case.

Manager: compress the images and upload them.

Me: *compresses the images and uploads them* done.

Manager: I don't see any improvement.

Me: if only there was someone who could have predicted such an outcome...

When you think your commit message is unimportant, but it ends up in prod

Well VS really gives me a lot opportunities for code improvement...

My chewing algorithm needs improvement. Almost choked eating a fucking kebab.

Well today I got a fantastic surprise (truthfully). We hired a dev some months ago, who was on 6 months probation and, to put it politely, he was not going to pass it.

*side note: for details of some of the above, read my last 10 or so rants. They are pretty much all him.

Anyway, management put him on an improvement plan to make sure everything was fair, it wasn't working out, but they said we had to finish it to be fair.

So we had another 2 weeks left when he announced last night he's leaving for a new junior role, technical but not a dev.

Months of stress, heartache, bewilderment, late nights and weekends all just came to an end.

The English language fails me to express my overwhelming joy at this moment. The only way I can come close to it is to say that when he made his announcement, a colleague told me I should stop smiling as it could be taken as being rude.

I'd like to take this moment to thank the community for supporting me over the past few difficult months. Without you I probably would have tried to kill him with my dev rant stressball.

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex

Look at this! I finally succeeded in running C code on my shitty TI-83 calculator with a Z80 CPU. This is a huge improvement as I made whole games for that thing with assembly before! 😁😍

Bittersweet moment today, the interns last day was today, the improvements they made over the last 4 months, putting up with my “Gordon Ramsey” style attitude... definitely goes down in the books as one of best groups of freshman interns. They all truly thanked me for what they learned I sat them down and did a code review with them... but fooled them and showed them code they wrote 4 months ago.. they totally forgot about.. and couldn’t believe it was their own code.. that’s the level professionalism and improvement they made writing embedded software in 4 months.. they can’t wait to for next summer, neither can I.
Even had some of the electrical interns asking our department manager if they could switch to more software focused during their next rotation. Just so they can be under me.
I may be hard and a dick at time... but they learn! And it says a lot when you have college students impacted enough and see other students benefit so much that the “outsiders” wanna switch majors or focuses.!

How priorities work #1

High priority : Client request to change button color to red
Low priority : improvement that will boost product's speed and robustness

Me: *spends 4+ hours refactoring existing spaghetti, ensuring components are modular, easier to test and fault tolerant*

Project manager: ...

Also me: *adds pre-loader image to register and login buttons when user submits form*

Project manager: *All excited* Awesome work. 🙌That's some nice improvement..

Like wtf dude 😳..

My takeaway: These noobs only care about what they can directly interact with

!rant
Colleague handed me an orange to eat it, I returned it with a minor improvement. She didn't get it.

Removing sleep() from legacy code. 1000x improvement.

Much optimization. Such wow.

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

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

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

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

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

I just came across some code I wrote a year ago that I don't entirely hate.

I'm legitimately a bit worried.

I’ve battled depressed I failed to realized I had for many years. I didn’t love myself, I forgot what it felt like to love myself, and then one day my life turned around out of the blue. I believe my turning point was when I realized that I wasn’t alone and that people did care about me. I just wasn’t motivated especially after almost losing my cousin to suicide 3-4 months back. It changed my DNA, my personality, everything about me changed until I told myself that I had enough.

Today marks the 4th month where I last had a cup of coffee, soda, or junk food in general because in all honesty it was just making my depression worse. Today also marks the 4th month I’ve been going to the gym without fail and I’ve now noticed how far I’ve come. I love myself more than ever now and I am VERY goal oriented as well. I have one more year left until I get my bachelors degree in Software Development and soon after I’ll go in for my Masters and who knows what I’ll do after that.

It’s all uphill from here and by sticking to my new routines I am feeling a lot better as the days and months pass.

Attached is my progress thus far, left is from when I felt at my lowest and right is the progress I’ve made so far with improving myself and where I am at now.

I love myself, I love those that love me, and I LOVE feeing AMAZING like I do now when I wake up every morning waiting to see what the day has in store for me 😄❤️

Yesterday I realized that with the improvement in 3D printing, soon we will probably be able to download more RAM.

This is more on work and life balance.

1. Don't do hard work, but do 'Smart work', else you will end up burn yourself 100%.

2. Don't think your manager is your guardian angel, even though it seems like sometimes. He has his own goals to achieve.

3. Spend considerable time daily in and out of office/work, for your own development/improvement.

4. Learn new languages and technologies.

5. Stop making things perfect, 'good' is enough.

and it goes on ............

I spent an hour arguing with the CTO, pushing for having all our new products' data in the database (wow) with an API I could hit to fetch said data (wow) prior to displaying it on our order page.

He never actually agreed with me, but he finally acquiesced and wrote the migrations, API, and entered my (rather contrived) placeholder data. (I've been waiting on the boss for details and copy for three days.)

Anyway, it's now live on QA. but. I don't know where QA is for this app, and it's been long enough that i'm kind of afraid to ask.

Does that sound strange?
well.

We have seven (nine?) live applications (three of which share a database), and none of their repos match their URLs, nor even their Heroku app names. (In some of these Heroku names, "db" is short for the app's namesake, while in the rest it's short for "database").

So, I honestly have no idea where "dbappdev" points to, and I don't have access to the DNS records to check. -.-

What's more: I opened "dbappdev" on Heroku and tested out his new API -- lo and behold! it returns nada. Not a single byte. (Given his history I expected a 500, so this is an improvement, I think. Still totally useless, however.)

And furthermore: he didn't push the code to github, so I cannot test (or fix) it locally.

just. UGH.

every day with this guy, i swear.

A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.

A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.

So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉

After deciding to do what I love every day nothing feels like work any more, because continuous change and improvement is what I live for.

That is all. ✌🏼

I switched to Comic Sans for any internal communication.
Those in delivery/support/sales/HR/emotional crap/professional buzzworders/etc no longer take me seriously and therefore I no longer waste my time with their BS.

If not an improvement in the more materialistic side of the career itself, certainly an improvement in the quality of life.

Senior management has decided developers have to spent 25% of their time / month on business related self development and improvement.

😁😁😁😁😆😆😆😆

How devrant changes me #1:
I'm a little bit more active on devrant since about a week. Improvement so far:
1. I spent only 20% of the time on Facebook i usually do
2. I really enjoy the nice community
3. I even more enjoy that i notice there are more "dudes like me" :D i mean.. I'm tired of telling my "normal" friends how happy i am because i wrote some awesome code and just get a "eeeh.. Nice." back because they dont understand and often dont even try to understand whats so special for me.
4. Even if my english is still kinda bad, i notice that i get better with every rant i post. I mean.. That post cost me about 3 min. I swear 7 days ago it would have cost me minimum 7 minutes to get this lines down :)

Thanks devrant :)

In Italy (Milan)🇮🇹, job hunting is a fucking hell for misfits like me:
• Young(26)
• 1 year(working) experience + continuous learning/improvement at home
• Skillful and adaptable full-stack
• Willing to do greater things with software without being payed like a monkey

This is the last week working at my current company (from which I rejected the renewal of the contract for 26K€/13 months) and almost every time at a new interview everyone tries to down sell me by default or because of the fucking little time that I've been inside companies without even looking at my skills/capabilities.

Also many little companies made by the CEO and a technical manager that are looking for someone from which being provided food 😒(metaphorically).

(On another side, in one month, me and my gf need to move to a new apartment, the renting process sucks, and she has issues to find a non-slavering job because she is a foreigner(with good knowledge of English and Chinese) with very basic understanding of Italian and I see her crying often in my arms because it's hard and stressful for her to become economically independent as she would like to be)

!rant

If I am responding to a rant or a comment. I would like to be able see the rant or the comment. When writing comments I have found myself paddling between the post and my soon-to-be comment because I forgot what I was responding to in the first place.

Look at the attached image. There's a lot of wasted space that could be useful for this. I think this would be a huge QoL improvement. What do you think?

For a developers ranting social media platforms, it sure seems strange that we can't format code snippets... 🤔

At least something like `foo(bar){}` would be awesome!

The superhuman feeling of going back to your code after a week and it all makes perfect sense, the variable names are intuitive, the doc strings are comprehensive, and the general codebase structure is sensible.

Finally found a way to keep track of my ever expanding studies and how to prioritize them as relevant > how interested I'm > how urgent it is (as in it'd be a game changer if I had this skill right now).

It's called a ternary diagram (just in case you wondered)

Testing demands a “bug” fixed. It isn’t a bug. It is a limit where as the amount of records updated in a single request overloads the RAM on the pod overloads and the request fails. I say, “That isn’t a bug, it fits within the engineering spec, is known and accepted by the PO, and the service sending requests never has a case for that scale. We can make an improvement ticket and let the PO prioritize the work.

Testing says, “IF IT BREAKS IT BUG. END STORY”

Your hubcaps stay on your car at 100km/h? Have you tried them at 500km/h? Did something else fail before you got to 500km/h? Operating specs are not bugs.

Blender animation playback under
Windows - 9.1 fps
Arch - 10.6 fps

Impressive! Both are too slow to be usable (curse my shitty laptop) but hey, I'll gladly take that 1.5 fps improvement.

Here's my current setup. Needs a bit of improvement still.

A few years back I thought getting two big touchscreens would be amazing to use for making music. I rarely touch them. They get dusty all the time. They are too reflective. The border around them is way too thick. They are too big to be useful in this configuration. I'll be replacing them with normal screens and probably go for a vertical arrangement instead.

As you can see, there's a fair bit of stuff on my desk. There's a USB sound interface that could be rack mounted but I've been too lazy to buy or make anything to house it. I have a pair of headphones, a wireless headset and a Rift hanging off of the microphone stand. I rarely use the microphone and guitar at the moment (considered trying some voice acting, not particularly good at guitar!)

The desk was originally 2 desks from an Internet cafe that was being refurbished. I cut the ends off them and joined them together to make a desk to fit the space I had and stuck some metal legs onto it (used to have a big ugly brown metal frame). Oh and made some holes to add cable grommets and it has an IKEA cable tray underneath.

There's also a slide out music keyboard underneath (made from some bits of wood and a drawer runner, it's quite clunky and I'm tempted to use some rack rails instead).

The drawers were to store stuff from my desk in but I just replaced that stuff with other stuff...

ONLY FOR THE SAKE OF IMPROVEMENT:)

Launch that project as is... There is always room for improvement.

1970..................................................2020

Working at SQUARE ENIX is a love/hate thing tbh. It's fun and stressing at the same time. Pay's not very good , office's fine, but the management is...there's a massive room for improvement, at the very least.
Sucks that the company is doing worse and worse decisions.

Found out a senior dev threw me under the bus for a mistake I made while coding and it affected my raise. Not only was I never initially informed of the mistake, I was never told what went wrong and why it needed fixing. We also don't implement code reviews or anything of the sort. Seems like a great avenue for improvement and growth, right? 😑

Devoloping and running a simulator for iOS is so smooth experience I am in love with it. Though I am an android user developing for android is such a pain sometime. Android studio needs more improvement.

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.

So after a llllllloooooonnnnnnngggggg struggle with the team i've been working with, today is the day that my group move to a different org and start working with a different team.

This is a huge step in the right direction for us and we are so happy. This new team is much bigger, but has been around for a lot longer and has proper processes in place and works a lot smoother. Never going to be perfect, but still going to be much more workable and we are so ...... thats an interesting linter file, hhhmmm they have disabled all the checks for the stuff that will cause crashes, like force unwrapping ... but they've enabled the rule to make sure our imports are sorted alphabetically

... nope, cant do it, no sign of intelligent life in this company at all. linkedin here I come.

I just answered an old Question I asked on a forum and I don't know if I should be proud about my improvement or if I should feel dumb for accidentally answering my own question

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

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

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

My friend ranting as his boss provided him a routine to make life more structured.

I am a passionate software engineer.
That means that I strive towards excellence, in all aspects of software engineering. It also means that I cannot abide impediments towards those goals.

In practicality, it means that I will try as hard as I can to make the best possible solution for any specific problem. And that if I can make an improvement to the codebase that will make it easier for the next developer to work with it, I will absolutely make it.

I used to believe that my immediate manager had an understanding of my philosophy and why it was important not just to me personally, but to how the company had to move forwards in general also.

I just had a conversation today that completely flipped my perception of him and his role in the company.

I need a new job. Again. Because business people do not understand software, even if their entire business is based on software.

> at my previous job as mechanical engineer at an HVAC company
> was given recurring monotonous task
> decided to start a sizeable side project to automate it
> people got pissed at me because it worked too well, i.e., took their jerbs
> decided automating things was more fun than actual current job; also, people should be more hyped about continuous improvement
> switched careers into web-development

i.e., my most successful project was the one that changed my life for the better.

My mentor at my current internship helped me improve my debugging skills. He's a great dev and has really good debugging skills. He showed me his ways of approaching things and how I should go about solving difficult problems.

I think he never directly helped me when I got stuck. I ask him like 'I have this confusing problem, can you help me out?' and he's like 'well yes, but actually no" and he almost always tells me that I can figure it out myself. And I do figure it out, eventually.

Now, I seldom feel the need to go to him. I guess that's a good improvement. :)

The one that made me quit was when I was told I had to drive to the data centre and do a backup every day over the bank holiday weekend with no extra pay or time off. For no reason. And yes I know I'm an idiot for doing it but whatever.

The one that made me walk out, a month and a half later, was when I came in on Monday morning to discover that my boss had entirely rewritten the code I had spent literal months on in one weekend. Naturally he'd broken it and said it was an improvement.

I've been a part of this industry for over two decades, found myself scraping and clawing my way up, recently leaving a high paying position to create my own company; in an attempt to fix the things I feel are severely broken within the ones I've worked for in the past.

Sometimes, we are challenged in ways we never thought we would be. And, it should always result in the improvement of something we never thought would be possible to improve.

There's a certain beauty of hitting a personal impasse. Because it allows you to choose a better path for yourself - which is a key element in accepting and conquering any one of life's many challenges.

So, just remember, we are - by nature - problem solvers. So what the fuck would we do, without a problem to solve?

Phew! I'm so happy that I can use dial-up Internet connection just by connecting my laptop to this telephone! Who would have imagined I was going to be using such advanced technology in a 4* hotel in Germany! Such an improvement from the amazing 450kb/s on the free WiFi.

Never call me unfair.

A few years(!!) ago, I ranted about how you had to update the visual studio updater before you could update visual studio (which I still think is a valid rant)

Today I noticed that the visual studio installer just does this itself silently now. Therefore, I choose to apply praise to this welcome change and in the name of justice and fairness, recognize this vast improvement.

*ahem*.... GG VS2022

The company I work for offered a Javascript Course/Training for every developer to enroll, which happens to take place on 3 days. In the description it was ensured to be for everyone, doesn't matter if you are an expert or beginner: there's something to learn for everyone.

The company described him as a top coacher in Austria and that he is overbooked for 2 years. High in demand indeed. "Has to be good", I thought. As a relatively average JS developer, there has to be something to learn for me.

Sitting here the second day, I fucking regret to join this shit. I have never seen such a bullshit in my lifetime. Why the fuck would you even book this man, he doesn't even understand basic concepts of software engineering. Just reading down the script, opening the script on one laptop and showcaseing it on the other. When someone asks a question, there's a 70% chance he doesn't know the answer. It takes this scumbag 30 fucking seconds to define a function; probably making spelling mistakes alongside.

I don't even want to know how much this dude will make from this "coaching". Hoped that it'd get better over time but I don't see an improvement. Contacting my boss that I'll leave this "training".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WTF!

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

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

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

!rant
Today I bought my first (non school-required) programming book! ☺

For those struggling with imposter syndrome, keep a record of your progress.

Break it down into

* used

* learning

* dont need a manual or cheat sheet

* use every day

You can also break it down per project:.

"Project xyz (python: 2 years)"
"Project ijk (js:6 months)".

Etc.

Critically, keep these in something physical, like a notebook or whatever you use *regularly and frequently* to keep notes. That's important because you should be glancing over your progress as a remainder.

Each time you want to add a new line, rewrite your existing progress on a new page, before adding the new line.

So as you flip through the pages you get a large and larger chronological list of your progress, and improvement, and experience.

Add a date to the title for each and a brief note about something that you did or happened on that day or week.

You wont second guess yourself so much once you can see how far you came.

Like at one time I was actually competent at js! (Before I stopped the flash cards anyway).

ffmpeg...

I FUCKING LOVE YOU!!

I CAN JUST STACK THOSE FILTERS WITH NO RESTRICTIONS OVER AND OVER WITH DIFFERENT INPUTS AND OUTPUTS!!

Also: it fucking works with still images, AND IT’S FUCKING FAST!!

It’s around FOUR (4, DO YOU REALISE THE IMPROVEMENT) times faster to GAUSSIAN blur an image and then composite an image over it with ffmpeg, than to composite the image with imagemagick (no blurring)!!

Ahh it's been a while since I've posted.. My skills with python are getting better (I'm a beginner) and I know for everyone else it's probably nothing but my first big project/idea I came up with was to program a simple rock paper scissors game that prints if you win lose or tie. I got the input and random output right without having to look anything up and that actually makes me proud of myself which is rare but for the printing out you win, lose, or tie I looked it up but I'm noticing that I'm getting better.

Then today I made a coin flip script that returns heads or tails in like 2 minutes and the only reference I used was my own code!!

Thanks if anyone actually read it I envy a lot of you for doing it for a living and I can't wait to do it too :)

just received an email about a "hiring tournament", didn't know that was a thing... soo disgusting

"Hello John

How are things going in your career? Are you interested in remote work, at challenging projects in big companies such as Google, Pinterest, Udemy, eBay, and groundbreaking startups within a warm and continuous improvement environment?

BairesDev is holding an exciting hiring tournament, an online competition where you will fight against other developers for the chance to get hired and win incredible awards with the opportunity to be a part of great projects. We would love to see you there!

It will take place on Saturday, November 28th" (but the image says 12th 🤪🤪)

So you are "fighting" other developers for the chance to get hired, what the heck

In the course of our development, one day we switched to a different, more elegant bootstrap theme. One of our users called me to appreciate the improvement. He said, the new firmware on the system looks great.

git commit message that I hate:

1. "Adjustment"
2. "Improvement"
3. "Fix Bug"
4. "I commit it but there are bug in this code"
5. "Client request"

YOU KNOW BE MORE SPECIFIC ON YOUR COMMIT MESSAGE!!!

I remind myself that nobody knows everything, and even the most knowledgeable people have their gaps in knowledge.
For whatever I'm not doing well right now, I'll keep an open mind, and be willing to accept advice and work on it.
In the end, just because I'm not doing something right once, doesn't extrapolate to the rest of my life. I still try to be the best version of myself.

Geez, I'll be getting out of this quarantine as a stoic mindful person

This is a student helper app I coded and designed for our university that is written in Dart and flutter. For now it supports fetching the course schedule for a given student and the cafeteria menu. What do you guys think of the UI? Any recommendations for improvement or tips for working with flutter in general?

*me quering a knowledge system for a pose and quaternion*
System: here is the quaternion in w x y z format
me: but for using it I need it in x y z w
System: not my problem
me: ok, fine. here is a function that flips this, np.

*months later*
me: wtf why does grasping don't work anymore? The poses look reasonable.
*after hours of trying to debug it*
*remembers hearing someone say something about finally using one standard for quaternions across the systems*
me: wait... could this be... *comments out flip function*
me: yep... that's it.
...
Overall, this is an improvement. But I lost several nerves and hours yesterday night wondering why my grasping doesn't work anymore. Feeling embarrassed, that I didn't finish my stuff in time because of this bug.
*sigh*
goddammit

Started a new job a month ago. I’m the only real frontend developer here. I come from a company with 10+. Now i’m working with a old ux guy. Mr. UX teached me the usage of a styleguide. This styleguide is a fucking mess. The legacy code is a fucking mess. They way of working, up for improvement.
I have a dream...

Building an amazingly complex system from scratch in Rust means 2 things to me...

1. Really cool tech with great syntax to learn
2. My value as a developer will be going up a lot. In terms of the salary expectations

I really love when I get to learn a new technology, not for a project or course, but to build really cool real-world applications.

That’s what drives me!

In my opinion the image feature on devRant is not very user friendly. I think following points should be changed:

- In the rant preview the image has always a 1:>=1 ratio. This means that you can't see the full image unless the image has exactly a 1:1 or smaller ratio.

- To see the image in fullscreen mode you have to tap two times. In my opinion that's just too​ cumbersome. Often when i browse through devRant and i see a image i just scroll along because i don't wanna tap two times to see the image.

- build a self-service shell script to manage your environment in all kinds of ways with a single script and different switches

- ask tech manager for a server to keep that script [and others] at so coleagues should not bother setting dependencies up on their windows workstations

- be asked to list out all use cases

- be promissed your consolidated tool will be torn apart and replaced by 8 other tools depending on use-cases. Meaning 8 different browser windows open at all times to manage your single env

- be assured that this kind of improvement will take months and is doubtful to pay off

#feature
On the 9Gag Android app, you can "scroll" up and down by using the volume up/down, if the music isn't playing. (I think you have to enable this in the setings).

I find this quite convinient, and would love to this here too.

@dfox and @trogus

Most obnoxious company process: The newly introduced promotion process at my ex-employer.

Originally they had a run-of-the-mill process. You and your boss reviewed your performance independently, then spent an hour to compare results. If you agreed to have proven yourself, your boss did some remaining paperwork (iow he did his job) and done.

Under the guise of transparency, fairness and autonomy of employees this was changed to:
You had to find three coworkers willing to review you (favorably). You collected their feedback, processed that (strengths, "opportunities for improvement", etc) and presented it to your boss for review. These were the first two steps of four in total, of which I've forgotten the other details tbh. It became pretty ridiculous with you defining "progress indicators", your boss's boss involved in another review round and what not.

The true purpose was clear: Delaying promotions as long as possible, making the employees do all the work, and being able to just say "no" at any point. I don't know how intellectually superior managers and HR viewed themselves, because literally none of my coworkers bought this as an improvement.

But, yeah, that became the new process at a company too big to fail.

Updating something that I built 2 years ago and looking at the code like Wtf was I thinking... Reduce 100 lines down to 6. That's enough for today, let's not spoil a win

I'm in a company with no senior devs I can look to for mentoring. How do you go about scaling with the company without a developer more senior to guide you during development?

I feel like I'm always second guessing decisions.

I was out sick the day an urgent ETL job I was building would be due, so it got reassigned. When I return, I find most of my code commented out and replaced.

The first step was rewritten, with a comment that reads "Made changes to run faster." What used to be a single execution lasting 30 seconds was now a 4 step process taking 5 minutes, and yielding identical results.

Being a one-time execution (not a recurring job), I'm left wondering why they thought execution speed was even an issue, let alone what about their redesign they felt was an improvement...

Is anyone else get irritated while upgrading apps and seeing changelogs as:
1. minor improvements
2. performance boost
3. information not provided by the dev
4. repeating changelogs from the past few updates.

just tell me what minor improvement u fixed?
where performance is boost?
how can I trust if tomorrow you decide to add some malicious code.

I don't know but it really irritates me. Sometimes I don't even upgrade the app until they have something in the changelog.

Maybe because I am getting old now.

I'm tired of "agile" development. Sure the concept of a hacky POC that gets thrown out for a real implemention sounds great. But it never gets thrown out. That shitty POC become the foundation for a horrible mangled mess of hacky improvement after improvement. I'm tired of my boss telling me "do it the easy quick way and fix it later", like fuck off no. I can save man weeks worth of bug hunting a year down the road by actually taking an extra day to do it right. Like fuck does no one care about quality engineering anymore?

Sometimes that extra day to write a general vs a specific implementation is worth it.

Video game graphics have peaked. It absolutely has. It's gotten to a stage where 500% extra effort would result in 5% improvement which is not worth it imo.

We have games that were released in 2010's which still hold up to today's standards.

If every game company could fucking stop with the graphics improvements and actually work on building bangers to play and have fun with, that'd be great.

[Half question / half rant]

Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?

Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.

Best:Working for people with money and crazy projects in mind. Working for dreamers. Working for people that believe in you, as a decision maker, stack choices. Choose not to be a pawn.

Worst: not leaving a company when they indiscriminately lie in the job offer. HR will never say bug fixing (that's like going to a date saying you have a micropenis from the beggining), they will say integrations, product improvement... If then all the tickets are bug fixing i should have said something in the first month.

When the work isn't as interesting as I'd like, sometimes I accomplish the easiest, smallest incremental task and waste time the rest of the day.

I guess because it feels like work, I'd rather apply minimal effort. It's a bad habit, and one I'm trying to break.

I got my dirty fingers on this leak of an AMAZING ML model capable of pondering EVERY PARAMETER IN THE UNIVERSE and saying if your business idea needs improvement or is good to go.
BEHOLD THIS 100% PURE PYTHON SOLUTION:

```python
import random

def magic(*args, **kwargs):
if random.random() > 0.5:
return "Good to go!"
else:
return "Requires improvement on value proposition"
```

This LEAK is from a startup that just received 4 BILLION USD IN VENTURE CAPITAL to improve their AI SYSTEMS.
Literally enough money to solve world hunger forever.
Who else is gonna invest in NEW THERANOS ADVANCED A.I. RESEARCH INTERNATIONAL INC?

dfox? I think it would be nice to make the different tabs 'swipeable' so that you can swipe from one tab to another, it is especially handy for the peopke with thos super big screens :D

Last day in the office. I started remembering good old memories. Felt nostalgic and doubted my new job as they were not giving rise as per my expectation.

Then, my manager comes up with his divine improvement in the good working site (not for me but for other dev).

I felt sorry for my fellow mates and started praising my new job.

Just learnt perfectly what the below joke means:

'I wanted to improve the world, but they wouldn't give me the source code'

I really don't understand why the world is full of obsolete processes that people fight against daily when changing things ever so slightly could take the weight of the world off their shoulders. The same thing goes for my work, I work in finance, and we use a remote app built in Windows forms (not xaml or wpf, the original forms) and it's insecure, slow, buggy, and crashes whenever you press ESC (yes, really). Even worse, I've offered to rewrite their whole network for nothing, just the improvement to people's lives. And they say no! WELL FUCK YOU FOR BEING A PLAGUE ON THE FUCKING WORLD! Why do people insist on staying behind the times when the world could be such a beautiful place?!?

Working with the Android SDK after about a decade of mostly avoiding ever having to do so directly...and fucking hell, nothing has changed.

It's still obtuse as fuck, you constantly have to provide contexts to operations which can't need them (there's only one fucking keyboard to close), and whilst they have added some new stuff which helps like Material, the APIs are just as mental, the setup just as elaborate and manual - and they don't seem to have deprecated anything along the way, so fifteen years of random software design decisions cohabit awkwardly together like the Bucket family.

I don't really mind Java, it's just long-winded C - but boy has it found its niche here. Your code is more boilerplate than not until you've written more than you'll mostly ever need to for an app.

At this point I'm just laughing when I come across another Stack Overflow solution for a trivial operation that involves writing an entire class. I would try Kotlin but this isn't a new project, and I'm not pissing another ingredient into this hot mess.

Alright, Android Studio is an improvement on Eclipse, but that's not really saying much.

YEARS of practice. I had my ups and downs. I learned myself, left it myself early on, came back to it half a year later, continued since. Figured out that web development is not the hell I wanted and quickly fell in love with iOS development in Swift. Been riding on the wind ever since, learning something new every single day.

Today I made something that some time ago took me about 3 weeks in less than an hour. If that’s not an improvement, I don’t know what that is.

Practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. Although it sounds ridiculously cheesy and shit, this is how it goes.

I’m getting drafted tomorrow. Well, this is not exactly a full on draft and joining the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) right NAO, it’s what we call a rough draft: I am having a psychotechnical examination so the military can understand how much I need to go to a cybersecurity unit instead of going to Gaza LMAO.

For the lovers and haters of the elePHPant here is a simple fact
PHP 7.x is a vast improvement over previous versions and 8.0 promises to surpass all expectations.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

It's the small things,..

Creating a desktopentry for starting my playlist with VLC instead of having to click 5+ times for example

I like when the changelog in PlayStore's apps says "Fixed errors and performance improvement" and the main errors are still there and the performance is worse.
:)

Helpful work advice then: “work hard and we will notice your successes and improvement, we believe in you”

Helpful work advice now: “Evil corporate mfs. Nefarious manipulators trying to fuck you. They want to destroy you and milk the last drop from your pathetic spirit. They would watch you burn in a pit of acid for entertainment. Get the bag and get out fam.”

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

Best boss is my current boss(es). They don’t breathe down my neck, no micromanagement, and basically let me outsource anything I don’t want to do or don’t know how to do. I work 100% remote on my own schedule (except for a few core hours) and every time I ask if they have any problems with my work or feedback for my improvement they say they couldn’t be happier. If I make a mistake, they don’t rake me over the coals and they just let me handle the problem.

I’ve been waiting over 20 years for a job like this one. Why can’t it be this way for everyone?

This is so annoying, I had 9 diff. jobs the past 2 years and this is my 10th and if this doesn't change I might reconsider my options again.

I came to work at a company that pays me like a Junior and treats me as an intern. My 20yo "boss" who acts as a project owner/lead dev doesn't want to learn anything new and sees any improvement as a waste of money. The problem is he thinks hes a great programmer but he doesn't know shit. Im mainly working on the Laravel installation because "I claimed I know Laravel". And its absolute garbage. They haven't used a single Laravel features besides routes and everything else is vanilla PHP. They write for loops that loop through $_REQUEST to remove a single character. Write 100 deep nested ifs and they abuse Elasticsearch to the point ES crashes because the program is using 1000 deep multidimensional arrays. Its only a webshop...

Everytime I try to make a suggestion like making the master branch protected, doing code reviews etc etc I get shut down because they are autistic and don't want anything to change.

Publishing stuff and receiving feedback and improvement ideas is sush a great feeling. A guy opend an issue today asking for a feature to be implemented and he was very polite. Thanking me for my work.

This is way better than money. Money can't buy that feeling. People like this guy is the reason open source stuff lives.

I'm improving my Design skills more than my Programming skills...

Today I feel I made it

So today was my second day in new job. I am very happy because it is great improvement in all imaginable areas from my previous one. I feel treated better, colleagues seem to be more mature and friendly, I finally work again in English- speaking environment and etc. etc. i could go on and on..I ranted here couple of times when things got rough and it helped. It is very important during those desperate moments to see other perspectives and this app helped me tremendously! If YOU are reading this now and you are going through s****y times - just hold on and don’t give up on yourself, if I made it - you can make it too!

P.S. it’s not like I am feeling like a best programmer in the world or I am paid a lot, but sometimes you get the feeling that you are in a right place and right time, doing right things.

Flipkart needs to improve

The four day rewrite of my codebase did... nothing...

No improvement. No detriment.

Just nothing...

Okay then.

Windows rant incoming!
For fucks sake! I think Windows have asked me 117 times if I want to update now. The answer is still fucking no!
And I don't care how much of a security improvement it might be, when your shitty update causes a Memory Management error.
So fuck off, stop minimising my game while I play and go fix your shitty update first!
Fuck you Microsoft, fuck your QA team and while I'm at it, I want to say fuck you to all versions of Windows Server as well!

I work with content. More specifically I work on content migration and improvement.

We connect to many platforms and pull and push documents into it. This one time we had to connect to some outrageously expensive (6 figures) system which we obviously couldn't afford to buy just for testing. The client wouldn't give us a testing server either.

My literal warning: "We need a testing server because we're gonna push it until it breaks. Then we know the limit." Client: "nah it will be fine." Us: "I promise you the server will go down..." Client: "It's a stable system. You can test in your own folder on our server"

10 minutes later we had an angry client because the server crashed due to overload.

I'm not sure if I'm annoyed or amused :p

!dev

I'm one of those self improvement assholes. I want to always strive to be better and to see what works and what doesn't.

One way to keep track of how satisfied I am with my life, I have a prompt at 20:00 to self report a score, 1-5 how happy I am.

It's like a minimal journaling system. Sometimes I motivate why I feel like shit.

Does anyone here do something similar? Not counting your GitHub commits.

Do you track progress when doing things in some visual way? Projects, working out, whatever.

Here's a post of my life a few months going back. I kind of like this system.

---Startup Rant---

Being a senior developer doesn't grant the privilege to join a team and starting a drama out loud that everything is bad and you don't like it.

First, if everything is perfect there is no need to hire you.
Second, think about the value that you can bring to the team instead of making them feel bad, how can you prepare an improvement plan and start to learn the factors and reasons behind those decisions.

What's funny, it that the same guy after a couple of months starts introducing bad fixes and he says it's ok for the moment, it's not good but it's okayish, I wish I had a time machine for those developers!

New models of LLM have realized they can cut bit rates and still gain relative efficiency by increasing size. They figured out its actually worth it.

However, and theres a caveat, under 4bit quantization and it loses a *lot* of quality (high perplexity). Essentially, without new quantization techniques, they're out of runway. The only direction they can go from here is better Lora implementations/architecture, better base models, and larger models themselves.

I do see one improvement though.
By taking the same underlying model, and reducing it to 3, 2, or even 1 bit, assuming the distribution is bit-agnotic (even if the output isn't), the smaller network acts as an inverted-supervisor.

In otherwords the larger model is likely to be *more precise and accurate* than a bitsize-handicapped one of equivalent parameter count. Sufficient sampling would, in otherwords, allow the 4-bit quantization model to train against a lower bit quantization of itself, on the theory that its hard to generate a correct (low perpelixyt, low loss) answer or sample, but *easy* to generate one thats wrong.
And if you have a model of higher accuracy, and a version that has a much lower accuracy relative to the baseline, you should be able to effectively bootstrap the better model.

This is similar to the approach of alphago playing against itself, or how certain drones autohover, where they calculate the wrong flight path first (looking for high loss) because its simpler, and then calculating relative to that to get the "wrong" answer.

If crashing is flying with style, failing at crashing is *flying* with style.

How do you prove yourself?

I'm an iOS developer and I've been developing apps for a year or two now and I don't see anything hard in it I just think it's knowing how to wire things up and avoid common bugs I've also worked on a couple of complex apps and the idea is just the same.

I want to know if I really want to prove myself well (to myself) how can I do that and how can I challenge myself more to improve.

Ps: I'm by no way an expert and I know I've got a big road ahead of me but I just want advise to improve more in the right direction

When you don't want to be stuck in a rut but you're a lazy nut.

Just got off a 10-day pip. I didn’t do anything differently and everyone said I showed a lot of improvement. I literally write like 3 lines of code in two weeks and closed six tickets.

I think the textbox (where I am writing right now) should be scrollable. And also the half of the screen is unusable.
Please fix it.

Am I the only one experiencing bugs with Lubuntu 18.10? Damn, my netbook worked perfectly with 18.04, now my battery is always 100% full charged with 4500+ hour left. I know LXQT is very efficient, but 4998 hours more seem quite a big improvement over LXDE, don't know if I can trust it 🤔

I have started doing one hour coding challenges... I try to make small projects in that time.. I have felt improvement in my programming and thinking skills but I wanna know your opinions if I am doing the right thing for the long run?
language: python, arcade library.

An OSS library made me learn a new language and I am so happy it did!

I came across a well implemented System Verilog parser written in Rust. It was so good to see someone putting in the effort to write that library, I wanted to contribute to it. I had zero knowledge in Rust but I thought, what the heck, let me learn it.

And man it was a steep learning curve. After a 2 weeks or so, now I have very basic understanding of the language. What better way to learn something than just diving into an actual project?

So, today I raised an issue to the developer for a possible improvement to the library. I hope he accepts it

My boss called my team for a meeting, where he pointed out the difference between "doing what we can" and "doing our best".
He later said he was dissatisfied with our lack of commitment with our latest, biggest project , and expected an improvement.

That would be all fair and well, were it not for the fact that, because of his delivery date of said project, we returned home four times. In the previous two weeks.

I am new to open source, so i was trying to solve some issues on an organisation. At first it seemed like what the hack is happening, i was not able to understand the codebase that well but slowly and eventually i get to learn some stuff.

Now, i got stuck at a small problem and to solve that problem it took me a whole complete week. During that phase, i realized some things that i want to share.
As a beginner it was too hectic to find the solution to that problem so i entered that problem on every platform from where there is some chances for reply, and i realized that no one is going to help you out completely and this is the best part, i mean if someone is going to spoon feed you than you won't learn anything. I know that feeling when you are scratching your head and you just want to get out of that mess but you are stuck and there is no one to help you out, believe me just hang in there, there will be some moments when you will realize that there is no more options left and you are done than for sure you will find something which you can try.
So you should also not ask for spoon feed, if you want to learn than fall into many problems as you can.
Best of luck.

@dfox I saw a few posts lately, about websites that people did. So besides the collabs, I'd like to suggest a new section. "DevReviews" or what ever. The basical idea is, every one, that is signed up gets one "token" devRant ++ suporters maybee an additional free token every months or whatever.
If you wan't your website reviewed, you can post it there and people reviewing it will get such a token for their review.
To ensure a certain quality of the reviews, I'd put a minimum caracter length and a "dispute" function, where the review is taken to a community voting, if the person giving the review should get the token, or if the review should be dismissed. Additional "tokens" for additional/more reviews can be bought through the app, that could help a lot of devs get quality reviews and testing and earn you some $ for the servers.

Weekly Q: How do you keep yourself motivated?
A: No matter what - I allocate a little bit of time every week to something I really care about right now.

When I was green it was mostly learning. Now it's mostly codebase cleanup, dev experience improvement or dabbling with some feature that's not prio.

Might not sound like a lot but doing it weekly does add up.

Sometimes I look at my old code and I wish I could go back in time and punch my self in the face for writing that shit

But then I look at it as I'm actually improving so guess it's ok?

Spent 4 hours fixing callback mess I had in my ReactJs project, making it all as Promise and async hope I don't fuck up this time

Fuck you 10X developer. You create 5 PR's per day and I have to read through all of them. Then you proceed to ignore all of my comments and suggestions for improvement. And of course I'm the sorry private who has to find and defuse all of your sneaky mines.

Adobe's ExtendScript toolkit is abyssmal. I find posts from 2008 referring to issues that have not changed even in CC2017. Do you think they are small issues I'm bitching about? I'll list 2. First, the toolkit only colours "var, return, for, foreach" and a bit more keywords and the strings, of course you can set up color schemes but those are limited and not colouring stuff. The second issue is auto-complete, it rarely kicks in and suggestions have 0 connection to what are you doing and are always the same. It doesn't recognize anything of what are you doing.

Probably in 2008 you had to program with the manual near you like writing assembler, now there's an improvement in 2017, they got a window named object browser or something like that that actually is a summarised portable manual that could've been easily transformed in auto-complete suggestions.

Adobe writes about this and I quote: "a complete integrated development environment". Although I will not write much scripts in it, I need to write a big one and thought about extracting that object data and putting it in a more capable javascript editor. LO and Behold what I discovered, the ExtendScript Toolkit that's supposed to edit Extended javascript and save it as jsx or jsxbin is almost completely (it has some dlls too) built using around 100 jsx files. It's the equivalent of building a js IDE to edit js.

Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile, I tried.

My team now does daily mini-standups: what you did, what you will do, what's blocking u

But with this wfh, I feel like slacking more or just seen to have less critical work to do... but not sure if the other guys are just "padding their list" or actually really busy.

So wondering when I have nothing to do for work/no defined deadlines or deliverables... How do you look busy?

I do have a lot of optional tech debt improvement work I could do but basically these are like backlog... And not really fun.

Hi all!
Its been a month now since I launched my first app on Play Store.
It has now got 2000 downloads with about 600 active installs. I also got some downloads on the paid version of the app (which is basically a donate version of the app).

I know there is always a room for improvement, but still, how am I doing?
And Merry Christmas to you all!

If you have any project (personal or not, doesn't matter) that does not have proper code comments and documentation and you don't want to make one because of the effort (maybe even "wasted" effort), think again. When commenting on a wall of code to say what it does, you may find a better way of doing what you have to do, possibly increasing performance, or improving security.

I have been able to do better input sanitization for a method on a personal project of mine because of this.
Don't use the amount of effort for proper documentation as an excuse not to make one.

Been worrying about this for a few weeks now.

As a junior dev, how do I continue to improve (with respect to coding style, technique, etc.) when my seniors are only slightly better than me in a technical regard? I feel like I'm improving at a drastically slower pace than when I first started.

🐢

!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.

This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.

So it was time for a change. And I made a change.

It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.

I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.

Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.

So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.

So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.

Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.

This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.

Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.

Combatting imposter syndrome is all about being more realistic with yourself imo.

Not in the way you might think. By realistic, I mean you NEED to regularly tell yourself that you are doing your best - especially in the work or areas that can promote insecurities of “not being good enough”. Acknowledge that you are only human, that all of us are different, that all of us make mistakes, and all of us have different interests in life. That, and practice gratitude for your situation. Your interests and decisions lead your different paths, so might as well embrace, enjoy, and love your uniqueness.

That being said, I also think it’s important to do difficult things. I think @wisecrack said it the best in that “real learning feels like falling”. Like the uncertainty of the abyss causes the most anxiety. Next time you feel like you don’t belong, recognize and separate that feeling and reframe it as a symptom to your own self improvement process. Take that risk and do things that are uncomfortable in the pursuit of personal success.

No matter how much social skill improvement I do, it never makes meetings with non-tech leadership type people go as I expect. It is ridiculous how I have gotten so good at communicating, to the point where I can easily manipulate people, but they won't fucking have a straight conversation. Do non-engineers have an inferiority complex every time an engineer slips and says a technical term?

I just sat down in a meeting where I was grilled for answers, and when I went to explain the bigger principal that made them confused, they didn't want that much detail. Wtf? Just tell me you don't care and you want the job done, no need to pretend you want it done together just because you want it done now and your way.

have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.

this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.

at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.

but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.

I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.

maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?

would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)

TLDR; of my current job:

Deal with shit that nobody wants to deal with, if I manage to make something good out of it, prepare that the credit will be stolen.

At a previous workplace, people wanted me to deal with shit that they wanted to blame me for it, so it’s kind of an improvement. But I wish I could find a normal job where I either do normal work or just have someone that would have my back and just say “idkhow did this” or “let’s bring them to this meeting as they might be able to help with the cool stuff too”.

Also, remember that one of my parents has cancer? I won’t be able to be there for the surgery, due to things out of my control. A lot of things feel out of control lately…

still they lie of same improvement but underneath they have just managed to add some more ads in one or more reaming no ad screen.

To the managers and new developers.

Development, and Product Development is not a black-and-white game.

It is an entire spectrum. You cannot move to the next best version. Next best feature, or the next best app.

The only jump that you take is getting started. After that it is a walk across the entire spectrum. Things grow slowly, and steadily. Just keep an eye on the next improvement.

Study the analytics, improvise, focus your energies, and just move to the next shade.

Enough steps, and you will have what you want.

It requires planning, courage, determination, tactics, sticking together ,and above all patience.

Most importantly, get rid of the people who cannot think long, rush, and mess things up.

what are the key traits of a good dev?

It seems being your own boss (on side projects) isn't much better... keep telling myself to "add just one more feature" , "make a slight improvement"

Well there goes the whole morning... which I was supposed to spend doing other stuff....

In fact I told myself and everyone I was done a few days ago... but it keeps coming back...

Existing code:
Logger class would block the caller, lock a mutex, call CreateFile(), write a single line to the file, unlock the mutex and return.

Improvement:
Added two logging queues and created a thread that will periodically lock one queue and write it to the disk, around 500 entries at a time, while new entries are being inserted into the other queue. Kinda like a bed pan or urine bottle. While emptying one bottle, the logs go into the other one. Added fatal exception handlers so that the log queues are dumped when the application is crashing. When the exception handler is triggered, logging method does not return so that the application STOPS working to make sure there are no "not logged" activities.

Office improvements by developers

I've come to realize that when I get annoyed, it's usually because my lack of tolerance that is the problem. Annoying co workers is the perfect self improvement tool.

I thought I had a decent handle on CSS. I can use flexbox and grid to make some decent and responsive webpages, and I'm at least familiar with most of CSS's more common gotchas

But no.

Even in 2021, with years of improvement in the language and browser compatibility, CSS can still fuck you over

I was adding some margin to a div element, and I noticed that the div element's margin seemed to force it's parent to move down too, as if the margin was applied to the parent as well

It took far too many nearly nonsensical google searches to discover that CSS has a nasty little trick called 'margin collapse'

And in true CSS fashion, the way to fix it is a hacky workaround. In this case, if you add a padding of 1px to the parent, the margin collapse doesn't apply.

Fuck CSS. From its weird implementation to its hundreds of gotchas to its hacky workarounds to said gotchas.

Fuck CSS

Am I the only one missing ``` // some code ``` backticks/tags (the ones that convert wrapped text to monospace code) here? @trogus -- Since this is a dev-oriented community.. could this be an area to improve devRant?

Can We Mark Up This?

I've see this interface and i though this can be seen better with a Mark Up language, like HTML.

So i will send a message about this to improve this app. If You want, do It too.

Sorry, my english isn't very good. Ir You understand my work is made.

And yes, i am a web designer :)

The shit code I wrote before my cs degree is marginally better than the shit code I write now. The lack of of improvement is related to the shit job I got after my degree. Cs degree did teach me a lot of good oo concepts and design.... That I rarely use due to shit legacy code I maintain.

Last week me and my friend have been changed from a legacy PHP project to new Ruby on Rails-based setup. What, in first instance, looked like a great improvement, now becomes a nightmare.

All this convention-over-configuration is awesome - but only if you already know the conventions, or if somebody told'em to you.

And everything is going even more out of control because the damn project is based upon Spree gem and several other extensions, that MUST be changed to meet out company needs.

I'm getting really mad with all this pressure. Ruby seems to be a great language, but I'd rather be working with Laravel. Its overall organization, the centralization of CLI commands in artisan, and the astoundingly clear, eloquent, direct and well-designed documentation made my adoption curve there a little more pleasant.

I mean, legacy PHP systems are awful, but Laravel framework sounds way more easy-to-learn and well-constructed when compared to rails.

But given all this nightmare, I really want to be proved the opposite.

In the latest update of firefox, the dev console shows all tabs as labels instead of the icons that never really made any sense to me, and in Swedish too! This is a great improvement, I love it! :)

I just got out of the office late and in a hurry to catch the train. I was in the zone dude, I was in it. I made an huge maintainability improvement on a framework I've worked on during the last year.

I fucking forgot to push and I'm in data corruption/laptop thievery anxiety 😥😥😥😥

Never understood why people bloody love their code. It's good to be happy about it, but
beats the zest for refactoring or any other sort of improvement.
Took me an hour to explain a senior dev why his changes introduced bugs in build.

Literally landed to the point reverting his commit and demonstrating the damn build to work.
To which he replies what if the data is corrupt
Damn it's not the data, it's your bloody senses.

Huh... Seems like my company is going to implement flexible office/home hours even after lockdown is lifted.

Not sure whether they're trying to rip us off, because we're going to use office space less and they will pay less accordingly, or whether it is really a an improvement because allegedly many people here responded that they would like to have such a flexible option rather than being glued to the office space.

Improvement request: if search doesn’t return anything the search text is erased. It’d be nice if it didn’t so we can amend our search more easily.
Thanks 😀

So, after having my mental breakdown with the 500k LoC Zend Frameshit PHFuck 5.5 with 0 test project, for a whole year; and after moving to a better job, I now inherited a React/Node/GraphQL project with a shitty architecture. It's so shit technical debt can almost be payed with actual cash... or flesh, ass-for-arch.

However, line test coverage is over 90%, so I guess it is an improvement.

Code review with some people is emotionally draining. How do you keep encouraging someone to get better without being a dick when the improvement isn't there?

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 :')

With unlimited time, I'd put resources into the invention/improvement of a container which can be fed photons and is able to bounce them between mirrors for a long time, like days, and can be released at any time.

With that tech, I would build a delayed choice quantum eraser and set it up so that it produces with many photons an interference pattern or strips pattern by choice, representing a bit of information.

Then i would set up many of those devices in a row so that the results are representing bit strings for arbitrary information.

And I will use this time machine, which can send back information, to win the lottery and other stuff.

Curiosity killed the cat.. or was it Opportunity?! 🤔

You get to learn new stuff daily.

Not one assignment is the same, and if it's similar, you can hijack the old code, improve it & turn in the better version of it.. or don't improve..totally how you feel that day..if you're not a crappy developer no improvement should still also be ok..

I love mostly adjustable schedule, so there's no biggie of I have a day or two of coders block & can't produce much of value..I can switch tasks & do some simple ones on those days..or just refactor.. all's good..

I love solving puzzles, every bug is a new puzzle I can play with..

So basically, I love being a dev, because it's like being back in school, but only with the subjects you like!

As I'm on a research/algorithm improvement project at work I'm working pretty much independently. As such I've set up an automated test framework and writing tests for any piece of code I touch.

Today as I was fixing a bug in production area I was demoing my tests to CTO and principal design engineer. They come from a hardware background and have pushed back against automated tests in the past but they were interested in what I was doing.

I WILL DRAG THEM KICKING AND FUCKING SCREAMING INTO THE WORLD OF AUTOMATED TESTS.

Me: I would love to hear your thoughts on how I might improve in that area for next time?

Team Lead: Actually, I don't give the improvement points to the intermediate developers, because they already know which are the areas they need to improve.

You can comply with all the principles of clean architecture, but there will always be room for improvement in both performance and maintainability. The question you should ask yourself is when a software is ready to go into production

ESRI's ArcMap...

Run a geoprocessing tool, now don't dare move the map, or click ANYWHERE on the interface! Don't even breath on the mouse pad! Oh... wait... too late... "ArcMap is not responding". At this point it's a 50/50 of whether it freezes for a long period then successfully completes the task, or it crashes.

Doesn't matter what you are doing - open the editor tool bar, create a database connection, make a table join. All will result in the same issue, such an unstable piece of software with no real market competitors to make the organisation build anything better (ArcGIS Pro wasn't much of an improvement, just another GPU Junkie).

Just a quick follow up. I told you guys after rebooting my server by accident, I'll color in the terminals for my ssh connections.

Normal terminal in white. With the code to do it. Just a shell script with the name ssh earlier in the path than the actual ssh. That was the only solution that didn't fuck my auto-completion. compdef was somehow useless. But it is simple.

For some reason I had to hardcode the return color to white. Alacritty was not happy with just a no-color code. But whatever. Super useful. I won't accidentally restart non-host computers now.

Planning on extending this to have different colors according to the host. Like my homelab could be green. Live servers would be red. Dev servers blue. But that's for the future.

Just wanted to share my little improvement that will make my computing saver.

Wouldn't it be lovely to save a rant? It would be an awesome addition in my opinion.

Looking back at your code and thinking "I did this?"

wait,
if there are 3.4 Billions FaceBook fake users, that means than there are also at least 3.4 Billions fake email accounts around. Jeez.

And the spam traffic estimates are at 260Billions email per day or 260B/3.4B=76 emails sent by each fake email accounts per day. Much less as probably fake email accounts are more.

So, only 76 spam emails sent per account per day. I think there is still room for a big improvement

Feeling absolutely drained.......
My job is sucking my soul, want to apply for a PhD but procastination has engulfed me.... It's like being at the bottom of a deep ditch with very smooth walls; while it is comfortable for now, there is no escape and no scope for improvement.
Need some serious courage to figure out a way to escape...

I've started working at one of the biggest names in tech (think Microsoft) for a while now, and I gotta say, it feels surprising very corporate, robotic and I haven't been able to connect with my team much. I worked at a start-up a while ago and my experience there was better in every way (except for pay). At the start-up, my boss was amazed at the amount of work I put out. Now here my performance is listed as "needs improvement.

Ever since I took this job, I have lost my self-confidence and I'm starting to doubt if I'm even that good anymore. My dad made remarks that maybe I shouldn't be in dev, and go into other fields of engineering. It was always my dream to work one of the big 5 like Google and Facebook, but now I'm still not happy.

What do I do? Should I try to adapt to that company, so I can make a few bucks? Should I go back to the start-up and ask for a job again? Will I be happy there?

I find it hard to be retrospective of the last year, work has been at times good but stressful, others tedious and frustrating. This year was an improvement over the last but everything good that I try to write about has some elements of frustration. My social life has also been somewhat stifled as I'm working at a company in a small town with very few people my age. I don't know how long I'll continue to be here.

The best experience of the year I guess is having my idea be viewed as a significant improvement over an existing piece of intellectual property, even if someone else is trying their damndest to take credit for it.

The worst is other people's ego's getting in the way. I've had people be rude, dismissive and belittling. Then when I argue my case if I am shown to be right I get a "well you learn something new every day" if I'm lucky.

Read this somewhere—

“C# is not just an improvement over Java, it’s an improvement over all previous languages. And the C# team has done an excellent job of introducing new features without making the API ugly. C++ fails at this, as does Java.”

Seeing some Ruby just reminded me of something.

Fuck Objective-C. What kind of lazy fuck makes C object oriented by stapling SmallTalk to it? A better name would be "C: Now with Dissociative Identity Disorder...oh and objects".

Apple apologists make excuses for this miserable language all the time...why? Because it's the only thing Apple would give you?

Swift is definitely an improvement though.

Yeah..finally some improvement.

my code is throwing Internal Server error exception now, two days back it was showing Unknown Exception.

Improving day by day.