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.

A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

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

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.

!dev

TL;DR : I am sad about wonderful people that might lose their job and passion because of dumb fucking little shit eaters.

My 14yo sister told my family and me, today, about her science teacher who's a young unexperienced woman. She tried, at the start of the year, to be the "friendly" kind of teacher, allowing to eat or drink during class as long as it doesn't disrupt others, but quickly had to become severe because the students would not respect her even a bit (they still don't). They talk and never listen during her classes, they don't say hello, good bye, or anything when they see her, they are openly disrespectful towards her, etc..
As a result, the classes don't go well, the student don't learn anything, and these little hairy sweatballs still have enough nerves to go rant about her at her superiors ! The superiors answered that they're going to fire her next year since so much student complain about her.
FUCK.
- Thinking she was the problem, she assisted to some other teacher's science course to learn how to dispense her owns, in hope she could understand how to interest her students. These wonderful blond heads mocked her for that (I guess that self improvement is something laughable for the next generation)
- Students wanted some blank exams from previous years for a kind of country-wide exam they are going to take. She brought a whole box of it, not even one dipshit took one. Seeing that, my sister took some just to cheer her a bit.
- Students wanted some remedial course. She organised one, booked a room, prepared a lot of exercises and synthesis to hand them out. Would somebody care enough to show ? Not even one. She stayed 2 hours alone in hope that some student would come late.
- Once she was a bit ill and came to school anyway. After she left the room to go to the toilets because she had some food trying to go out from the wrong way, she came back after and tried to finish her class, while she would have had the right to go home and rest...

That's the kind of people who love their job and tries to do it well. Teaching is something beautiful and wonderful, and actually aiming at dispensing it in the best way possible is a great quality. She's available and volunteer, and all she gets is whining students and the risk to lose her job. She was smiling at the start of the year, now she just seem on the edge of crying everyday, every minute. According to my sister, she's the only teacher who's actually trying to teach, and she's the least rewarded of them all.
That fucking breaks my heart. I would smack their tiny pinheads with my terminally ill dog shit if I could. Because of them, she's may lose her job, and worse, her passion. She may become some bitter teacher, dispensing boring material because she has to eat, or just quit teaching altogether, while the world needs more people like that...

I'm sorry for the long rant, but I had to share it, it burdened me. I have a very deep respect for (real) teachers and this kind of story touches me on a very personal level... I hope my children won't be like that (I will make sure they won"t), and I hope the youngest devRanters here aren't like that either. I feel like many people never recognize the luck they have and the wonderful people they meet. You fucking have a chance to learn, to get an education, to raise your brain, to prepare your future, to sharpen your thinking, to enhance your knowledge... And you just piss on it like it was a dead pigeon. Well guess what : you are the dead pigeon. Or you would if you had wings, because at least, one day, the pigeon flew. You, you just dig some stinky hole in your own ignorant excretions, decorating it with glitter and calling it "swag".

I told my sister to go talk to the superiors and try to make them think twice before blindly firing a hopeful person. If they have to do it, the least they can do is to ask themselves why. I also told her to give this teacher some comforting words, just a short letter to let her know that her efforts don't go unnoticed. I think if was in that kind of situation, it would help me a bit if even one person came to tell me that I do well...

I really hope this teacher will be doing well next year and won't give up.
Please educate your children to appreciate what they have and to be supportive, even towards older people. They will grow appreciated and appreciating. Don't let them become spoiled shits who thinks life is doing everything just for them.

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

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

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! 😁😍

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

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

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

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

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

A little run down would be:

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

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

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

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

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

- Indentation is a mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this DNS by Cloudfare and have seen slight improvement in performance.

How reliable and trustworthy it is?

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

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!"

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.

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

I'm legitimately a bit worried.

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

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. 😉

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 ............

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 :)

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.

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

😁😁😁😁😆😆😆😆

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)

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.

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. ✌🏼

!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!

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...

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)

I work as a software developer for a small and specialized company on a very popular, albeit niche, piece of system software.

This software has been around for a while, and in that while it has ages. If there is one thing you could say to have aged gracefully--well, this thing ain't it. The codebase itself is what anyone would expect of a large-ish C++/C product started in the mid 2000s: documented poorly (and where it is documented, documented *wrong*), full of obscure bugs, full of idiosyncratic design choices that caused the obscure bugs in the first place, and a code style--or rather a general approach to software engineering--taken straight fom the 80s.

It is also fair to say that the product has been developed by marketing. What started out as a company-internal project to help others get work done was perceived as valuable for others, quickly rushed out to market, and "developed" by listening to whichever customer screamed loudest at that point in time. ("Developed", in the "duct tape and WD40" style of development similar to an early 90s web page: the result has no class, no style and everything users find "interesting" to interact with is a java applet.)

About six months ago the powers that be finally acknowledged that a codebase that has not seen a single line of refactoring since its inception over ten years ago is not a solid foundation for further business. What was once an openly hostile attitude towards refactoring and general improvement of the codebase itself rather than the set of user-visible functions slowly morphed into a secretly hostile attitude. Upper-level management continued to denigrate developers seeking to improve the system citing their own experience ten years ago as reason why things must still be done exactly as they have did. Parts of this upper-level management were soon complimented on their work and it was suggested they take the next step in their carreer.

Which they did, with two toes of one foot. The other eight remained in internal discussions and, more importantly, inside the head and arse of the new managers. Which promptly turned just as secretly hostile and blocked all attempts at improvement. Instead it is highlighted that the developers are clearly not smart enough to do their jobs.

Meanwhile the entire project is falling behind deadlines. We've failed to deliver on three accounts already and are now nine months behind on another plan that was set for 15 months nine months ago. (Yes. We have officially started working on this thing, but no work has been done. More to the point, work has been *started*, but is stalled or rejected continuously because "that's not what we would have done five years ago" or "you can't change that, whoever wrote it must have thought about this a lot.")

And now upper-level management has begun reverting changes that same upper-level management has requested and signed off on. Without communication. So that developers don't start work on things they have not signed off on (because they don't read the plans or give any feedback). Because developers are not qualified for their jobs and must be closely monitored to ensure they don't break stuff. Which was already broken. Because the product has been bitrotting since birth.

Fuck my life.

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.

I was looking at really old posts here (~2016) and noticed some of you have really been here for a long time and are still quite active, which I find awesome.
What struck me the most was when I saw members writing in a rather bad grammar at that time, although today you couldn't tell if it was their first or second language. In two years, some devranters have really improved their English, and I'm sure it's been the same for dev-related knowledge.

I realised that people can really change quickly, even if the transition is imperceptible. Keep working, you may not notice you're improving, but you are, the future will prove it.

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.

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? 😑

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

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 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. :)

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.

> 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.

TW: Opinionated rant is opinionated

The entire hype train about wireless bluetooth accessories is running on a shit-engine instead of steam. Holy flying fuck, I hate all things Bluetooth. Call me a fucking starfish for living under a rock or something, but trading functionality for a minor convenience improvement is totally baseless, in my opinion. And wires are not even that much of a bother, are they?

Wireless mouses, wireless keyboards, wireless speakers, wireless headphones, wireless all the things, because fuck you, cables, amirite? Who needs cables, it’s 2019, amirite?

Yes, because I like having to charge my accessories. When I used to have a wireless mouse and keyboard, I was literally inches away from tossing these pieces of hot steaming shitballs out the window every time i had to change the battery. I’d take a cable any day if I had a choice between changing the battery of a fucking mouse every month or so and a simple wired connection.

Oh, and headphones. Yes, I love to charge my wireless Bluetooth headphones every now and then! Of course I do, because it’s trendy! And who cares about the degrading sound quality and latency issues of shitty Bluetooth connections? Compression? Why should I care about how my music sounds, I listen to MP3s anyway, they’re the superior audio format!

Fuck my life. It’s not becoming any better with manufacturers removing headphone jacks. Or making laptops with only 2 USB ports or something because “my trendy wireless accessories don’t need ports! Are you living in the Stone Age or what?”

Bluetooth is a shitstain if a protocol and should be purged from the market. Fuck it, fuck every manufacturer who makes Bluetooth accessories compulsory with a spikey pole in all holes. And most importantly, skin the folks at Apple alive for not FUCKING IMPLEMENTING APTX IN THEIR STUPID PHONES AND STILL PUSHING THEIR WIRELESS AUDIO ACCESSORIES!

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. :)

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

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.

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)!!

We had a tool to analyze a distributed system. To do that it collected a large data set--basically the entire data set of the system itself, just in a different format--and ran analyses on that. That tool went through three iterations.

First: dump everything into an SQLite database and run SQL queries. That approach failed spectacularly when the tool was used on system larger than the toy examples used for sales demonstrations: if it ran at all, it ran for weeks. Which is not something clients are very happy about, usually.

Second: dump everything into many SQLite databases, one database for each type of thing. To avoid the evil, evil locking overhead of SQLite. Failed just as well as the first thing try, but it did run marginally faster.

Then it was dumped on my desk. With the instructions "make it fast". Nothing else. Ripped out the entire database code and rewrote it from scratch to still support relational queries (code reuse, yay!), then optimized the living hell out of that for an end result of 30dB improvement in runtime. At that point the tool was no longer the bottleneck, but I was still scolded for having changed the code in order to get there. Some people ...

Today im gonna do the craziest shit ever just for the smallest improvement. Build compiler to compile latest kernel. So yeah lets build GCC9.
*/Yes this is Haxk20 rant/*

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.

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?

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

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."

*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

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.

- 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

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 :)

I once had a PM who would consistently ask us to fix one off "bugs" (read little design tweaks). He wouldn't even bother to write them down anywhere. He once came over and asked why we hadn't fixed one of his bugs. We had no idea what he was talking about. According to him, we were supposed to organize and prioritize according to his whim. He never logged into our task management system.

When it finally came time to sell off our work to some of the business owners, we showed some of the "bug fixes" we did because that's all we ever heard we were supposed to do. The business owners were mad that we hadn't done anything they had asked us to do. PM throws us under the bus saying that we didn't know how to do our jobs and that we never listened to him. I was so glad when he moved to be lead of the QA department. Then I wasn't so glad.

He would have bug quotas that his team would have to meet. He pitted the entire QA team against all of the devs saying things like, "All the devs suck at coding. It's our job to save the company and the world from their buggy software." He got the only good QA guy fired because he faked a bunch of documents stating that they had had performance reviews and no improvement was made (these meeting never actually took place), and that he hadn't been meeting his big quotas. He was outside of our department and was buddy buddy with one of the C-levels, so his word trumped ours.

Then one glorious day, after I had already left the company, his department was absolved into the technology group. That same day was the day he was fired.

I kind of pity him. I didn't know if he had a family, but how can a man such as that support his family? Perhaps he doesn't have a good relationship with his wife and that's why he sucked at his job?

Just a long rant here..

Im a bit of fed up with the "management" for this company.

- - - - -
There is a new guy joining the company which is being as "technical lead" a.k.a my new boss. His experience is a OracleDB expert. Anything related to oracle, just name it, he can do it.
But.. on other matter, he just dumb af. all his life only know "oracle", for that.. im really having a complex issue with him. There is a new project coming involving MariaDB, and the project is really complicated. This project is handled by me & him. So, since im not an expert guy, im doing lab test as much as i could, so that i get the knowledge and gist of it. But right now im stuck with my lab test, the project is just around the corner. I ask him to teach or look on his lab test or anything, but really waste my time. He doesnt even do anything about this, not even care. He just sitting, keep himself busy and everyday ask me either my lab test is working or not. I raise a concern that if im doing this alone, the company could facing serious issue, coz im stuck. He even said to me this project is complex af, even himself doesnt know what to do. but.. im not sure what he said is a joke or not but it seems pretty real for me. He just chilling, asking for update everyday..

For clarification : our company have ton of ESX / HyperV / RedHat Virtualization. U can create anything you want with any complex networking as you wish.

I did ask him once, really nicely, :"did you know how to setup the project environment?- out of curiosity"
His asnwer was :"by looking at the guide on the net, i can say MariaDB is really straight forward, really easy and for the load balancer part is really complex because not in the net at all"..
Then i ask :"did u do any labtest or what on this "complex part"?"..
He said :"no, im just reading the guide & my laptop couldnt handle this massive environment, its not supported"...
Me :"Our company have ton of virtual server, u know right?"......
Him :"I know"..
Me :"................."

Wtf im doing here man, im dead.. for sure, if this project went down, im the one will get blamed here. Added, this project is for BANK. Im not comfortable to drag him along, by the look of his ugly face + me blaming him.. I dont want him to feel pure loser. Im not that kind of evil..

Ugly face + loser at work = not a good combination right.
So.. i feel really bad.. idk what to do..

Then, i take another path to learn..
I ask for "MariaDB Training" since we both is dead meat.

now its been a month without any improvement.
Thats it..

I did raise my concern to our upper management,
Got no replied & wont even care. Dead. MoneyTalks.

Im starting to update my resume again..

Thanks for devRant.

Well, the primary goal of these interviews this week has been achieved. But it isn't really about getting a new job, that is just side benefit.

The primary goal was to see at what level my skills and personal development resides amoung my peers.

I can safely say I am definitely a solid intermediate dev with a solid foundation on Object Oriented Design Principles, algorithms, and logical thinking.

However, my personal life is still a mess, and if I am to succeed in this career field I need to clean that up some. Employers don't want to take on an individual with bad credit, mediocre work references, and no solid educational background.

I need to get my education in order, my credit in order, and a few other things. I am finding this is why my confidence lacks, not really my engineering skills.

I totally don't mind being asked to contribute to the improvement of the onboarding process while they just told me that they won't extend my contract and are gonna get someone else. that's totally fine.

#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

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

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...

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.

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?!?

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!

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.

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.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

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...

I have a co-worker who due to a variety of circumstances (mostly manipulation and luck) has become head of the development team. He's introduced many great changes like autoloading (PHP) and so likes progress which is great.

What's not great is he's completely childish and will fight to reject any change that doesn't come from him. Me and 2 other developers (with another one neutral / on the fence) tried to introduce Composer and he just sat there spreading FUD like Composer breaks $PATH.

The person complaining loudest about how terrible development is at my company, the person who threatens to quit on a weekly basis, is the one fighting literally any improvement.

Did I mention he's in charge?

I need a drink.

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.

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

!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.

Flipkart needs to improve

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.

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

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.
:)

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.

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.

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

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from rant import depression as fuck
from WhiskeyBottle import *
import time

while bottle.contents > 0.0 and time.datetime():
fuck.rant()

Yeah ok, this will be one of a few, but I'll try to keep it short. Damn, whiskey is not helping. Nor various smokables.

So yeah, have you ever had a dream? I consider myself a gamer the whole life, always loved creative worlds, dynamics, mechanics, plots, stuff you could and couldn't do. To the point I promised myself I'd make a game - NAH - I'll be making games in the future. You know, good games, that you come back to. Like Doom. Or those porn games.

Never went to Uni or nothing. Was born in a poor European country with Internet more broken than my soul right now. Years later, after acquiring some good hardware, learning a bunch of languages, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and experimenting for about 10 years now with small scripts, apps and mini-games I've come to this realization.

I only made one "full" "game" in my life, and that was when I was like 16 in Klik & Play (early Game Maker). And it was shit. It was horrible, horrible shit. It literally makes you want to cry when you play it. It's 16-bit brain cancer. And it's the best I've ever published.

Now I've been through countless prototypes, none of which I've developed any further. I had ideas, plans, even made some more advanced roadmaps and dev cycles. Estimated costs, time, mechanics, gameplay hooks.

I never finish anything.

I get bored. Frustrated sometimes. There's always an improvement, something that "if I'd finish that it would be it! Screw this thing I was working on now, THAT will be worth sacrificing it." It's tiresome. I'm getting old.

And honestly, I don't know how people do it anymore. Trying to compromise those side-projects (they take all my free time which is not much) and work is just... draining. I'm losing hope. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed into the gamedev world after all. Maybe I'll just pump half-assed pieces of crap everybody will hate.

Or worse, nobody will care.

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?

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.

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

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!

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 🤔

---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!

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.

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

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.

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

This happened in my engineering days.

Second semester of my engineering, intro to computer science.

Topic on computer virus

Professor : "Examples of virus are videogames."

Me : *Screaming internally.

FYI, this "professor" has a PhD in computer science.

Fast forwarding to the final semester. We were supposed to present our project.
Unfortunately this professor was our mentor for the project work.

I was dedicated to this project. I was working on this for 10 hours a day. We were supposed to show the progress of our project to our mentor in four project reviews for the entire semester before presenting it in the final exam.

On the first review of the project, he started asking questions which are completely unrelated to the project, asking us to implement features which will take a lot of time and completely unnecessary. Basically, he didn't understood the project at all. On top of that he was shouting on us instead of pointing out the errors and the areas of improvement on the project.

And then I thought " Why am I busting my ass on this project for this idiot?"

Got demotivated, and started working on my side projects.

For the next reviews, got similar project off the internet, presented the same thing for the reviews and in the final exam. Got an A grade.

Honestly, I don't understand how these people get their PhDs and become professors in colleges and universities.

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.

🐢

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...

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

@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.

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.

Holly fucking shit... After more than 20 God damn years of being horrible, the Window Registry Editor is getting an auto complete function in the search!!!

Context: coming in the Redstone 5 Update

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?

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.

what are the key traits of a good dev?

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.

Well, I am not sure whether this is supposed to be about worst experience as a reviewER or a reviewEE so I'ma do both. First as a reviewer.

So, on my first project in this company, I introduced automated build scripting (read: suggested, was "volunteered" to do it, then had to bust my ads to get it done). Prior to this, our process was run the thing in Visual Studio a bunch of times (don't ask) and package the resulting files. Well, new requirements made this not sustainable.

So after many many meetings in which I assured my co-workers that the script wouldn't cock up and go sideways and format our server (HOW???) and showed them how to work it AND added all the features they requested. I finally send the script out for code review. Oh the joy. Questions like: "why did you implement this?" Came from the guy who told me to implement it. "Can you change the formatting?" I checked and no. "Why isn't this to the code standard?" Because the code standard doesn't include scripting languages.

And here is the piece that takes the whole piss soaked shitsicle pie "I don't understand why we're doing this in the first place. We have a build process already, why do we need a new one?" FUCKING REALLY?!?!? YOU WERE IN THE GODS DAMNED MEETING WHERE WE DECIDED TO DO THIS!!! SET OUT THE REQUIREMENTS!!! LITERALLY EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THIS SCRIPT YOU WERE THERE AND YOU'RE ASKING WHY WE'RE DOING IT NOW!?!?! Fucking hell. I forced it through anyway because I had the higher ups all signed off on it, but seriously. Just because we're doing something new that slightly inconveniences you, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done. Stop being afraid of change.

Side note: these people actually would regularly hold up process and product improvement because change is scary.

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.

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.

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!

!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.

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

My CS department's professor for our algorithms class (learning stuff like big O, shortest path, etc.) was tenured and hated teaching. He preferred working on his research but was required to teach as part of his tenure. Not only did he hate teaching, he was also bad at it.

This man would stand at the front of the room, mumble into the chalkboard (we still had chalkboards in 2010 for some reason), and work through algorithm proofs. You could not hear or understand him past the 1st row. Occasionally, he'd make a mistake on the board, realise it halfway through the proof, go back, change it, and continue on with absolutely no explanation.

The class as a whole hated him because we literally were unable to learn under him. We ended up going to the department head. The department head thought he was going to be dealing with 1-2 students complaining about a professor for no reason. Instead, he got 12 students (half the class) who all said they couldn't learn under this professor and detailed the problems.

The department acted on this by getting the prof a TA to help explain what was going on to the class and hired a lesson plan writer for him. Remember, this is a professor with tenure and who has taught this class for about 20 years.

I had to drop the class to save my GPA before the changes took effect because my grade was too far gone, but the students that stayed noted a marked improvement.

I got this prof again the next semester and all of the changes they made the previous semester were dropped because it was too expensive for the department to keep up with. I manage to power through with help from a kind TA and walked out with my C.

When I graduated, we had the opportunity to discuss anything we wanted about the programme with the department head in an exit interview. Few students show up to these because they're optional, but I made sure to do so.

I told tales of the great professors I had throughout my degree and then moved onto this guy.

I told them they need to either have him stop teaching or do something about his tenure because he was actively preventing students from learning a critical part of their degree programme.

The response I got was as follows.

"So we get complaints every semester and during these exit interviews about this professor. We know he's terrible, but his tenure prevents us from doing much. We keep encouraging him to retire, but at 70 he still refuses to do so. He actually had a heart attack about a month ago and while he's recovering fine, we're hoping that this pushes him to finally retire."

Seriously, I get that tenure is helpful in some scenarios, but when you have to hope that a professor either dies or retires because you can't do anything about how bad he is, tenure isn't working right.

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 :)

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 :')

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

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'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.

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?

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 😥😥😥😥

Intel cores below gen 4 are bad. Cores above gen 4 cost a lot for minimal improvement. Therefore, a gen 4 is the optimal one to buy. That's what I've heard. True or false? What do you guys think I should buy (given that I'm on the strict budget of a teenager's pocket money)? Or should I give it up and choose a Ryzen?

This awesome moment when you‘re late into your thesis, find a possible improvement that would require new measurements, but then find out that this improvement can‘t be done with your constraints and there is nothing to do❤️

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.

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.

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.

First. I clarify my work schedule is from 7am to 4pm. I have a personal emergency so I must leave on time today.
Now my story: Today (finally) at noon they decide to publish the iOS and Android applications. The thing with the Android application is the other Developer is with a last minute improvement (since Monday) and is not over.

It's 2:45, the iOS app has already been sent for review, but Android is not. So when the Architect says that he already talked to the client and told him that everything is ready today, I asked the Developer if Android is already? and his response was "Almost I will finist at 3pm or 3:30".
(Hmmm) I'm worried about time so I say Ok, then Android will be published tomorrow! God he needs to finish the development, and I'm going to take new screenshot, do the merge with the development branch and everything that's need for a production release. So, the Project Manager says "Hell no! It will release today!" My answer: I have to leave at 4 and there is a lot of haste to do something so delicate.

I'm still waiting for an answer in slack from her.

Then the architect very "professionally" tells the other Developer to do it himself. It's almost 6pm and they still have not done anything

I finally got what I wanted. A raise and I'm moving to another team to get away from my lead who is a completelly obtuse human being.
Or so I thought...
Aparently, the change has been approved by everyone except the head of HR, who has been MIA for about two months now.
At the moment I may or may not receive my raise at the end of the month...
It gets better!! Today i was reminded why I wanted to get rid of my lead. Anual reviews are here again.
So, I go to the one on one review meeting with my lead. We start talking about the various topics and we get to the "needs improvement" section, where my jaw dropped.
The morron completed that section with all the things that were meant for the "good job" column (it's not called that but you get it). More than that...the imbecile refused to understand that he made a mistake. I had to call another team lead (from the team where I should have ended up by now) to explain to the moron how the fucking review works, only then did he admit his mistake.l and made the appropriate changes.
At the moment I regret ever joining this company and I also regret not owning a flamethrower!

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 have been working with a colleague on a "off the books" project to improve an internal process. We chose a two prong attack to automate the process and started work.
All well and fine so far. We ended up implementing and proposing our new approach to management. The manager liked it and urged us to continue and do an official demo this Friday.
This is where thing became annoying. We started out with a complete idea to improve and simplify everyone's lives but now I find out that my part is being "put on hold for the moment" and his part is getting the go ahead. What doesn't make sense is that the individual parts aren't an improvement one without the other so overall things will become even more complicated in my opinion.
I know for a fact that the guy talked to management and then things suddenly changed, what I can't deduce for certain is if it is an act of betrayal or a senseless management decision. As far as I know the guy, he doesn't seem the type to casually back-stab but I've had prior experiences where the same impression was horribly wrong.
What do you guys think?
(i realize that there is nowhere near enough information to make even an educated guess on your part or even on my part so i'm going to let this come down to statistics. Based on the personal experience of everyone who reads this and decides to answer, the scales will tilt either in favor of mal-intent or just a bad decision making and at least i'll start to get an idea on how to react)

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.

Today's achievement, refactoring forms for a better future,

Previously, a form "component", consisted of 700+ lines of unreadable mumble jumble 👉🏻👌🏻🐂💩and no room for improvement, it stores values one by one in the reducer, everytime a field changed, a reducer action is triggered, invoking a specific action for 1 specific field, and storing/formatting its values,

And they want to it to be able to support dynamic multiple form fields,

Suffice to say, I got the short end of the straw (as usual), and refactoring it using a new library was easier than I thought, overall 250+ lines, over 2 files, with all the required functionality,

I'm curious of the guys who made it in the first place,

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...

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

When a software improvement organization (cough Scrum.org) does this stupid crap with their passwords, causing us all to be pwned.

"as well as stability and performance improvement" aka revert the stupid address bar change that requires an extra click to actually edit the text.

Yes Google must've thought people were idiots to have to show a copy button by default and an extra button to edit the link...

Oh wait they must've realized actually they're the idiots. I actually used Firefox for a while but their tab manager with the square grid is annoying or some other issue...

Ok so first technical blog post/rant cuz I just reduced a lot of debt... Prolly gonna put this in an email to my boss (he says progress improvement is now a priority but there are some problems as listed below):

So last week, I spent a lot of time investigating db logs manually to figure out a prod issue: tiring, time consuming, and not very effective.

This week I built an app. It took a few days but having the time to design it correctly, it is very powerful.

So in order to really do process improvement, you need to have: dedicated the time, the problem solving mindset (the right people), and the understanding of what the problem is and why so you can build a good solution (time and people).

New upgrade of kernel 4.12 just awesome but startup is very slow. I am experiencing this shit in my centos7. Overall there is an improvement in I/O. Loving new kernel.

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.

This is kind of a loaded question because it's so broad. So I'll just throw my thoughts down on the idea anyways.

Honestly with all the way that game dev has come it's so sad to see just the increase of people that are so ungrateful and dont appreciate what went into making it. Complaining about small not a big deal bugs that occur, blaming the devs for stuff that's completely not up to them but the "idea man", etc. Although good things are coming out of it. Like children wanting to get into it more which is awesome and indie developers basically holding up the industry while majority of the AAA companies get their shit together. So I see all of that increasing. Also I'm expecting to see the Rust language start to be used in AAA titles replacing C++

Web dev I believe will just get more JavaScript improvement with new libraries, frameworks. I really hope the companies that had PHP5 legacy code get back on their feet quickly. But I hope we can become more accepting of JavaScript doing more than just webdev like Electron, WebGL, etc. Because I think it's great that it can do all that stuff. Is there better options hell yeah but let's let people do crazy shit.

Software dev well I see python making a bigger uprising and I'm hoping people become more accepting of python as well.

These are all just random thoughts so please take that into consideration

Over the last few years, i explored the DMZ between dev's world and customer's world. It is a DMZ where both are in contact, ones trying to convince the others to invest on them, and i was just shocked !
People are so stupid and Elitist, they think that an ultimate great godly dev exist !
It is totally fake for sure, they image that a good have to know absolutely everything about all the damn languages (while everyone googles every single comment received, even the most "advanced" dev)
I am shocked to see how people apply their everyday life metrics to the dev's world, i mean, there are a lot of devs around, everyone coding his way to self-improvement, we are all different, we have trends, and we can definitly define groups of developers and types of developers, but people think that a good dev have to come from silicon valley ! Does it means that a dev coming from Vladivostok is less worth ? even he is more dynamic in his approach ? even if he yields more results in terms of solutions ? (SV devs tends to be too much technical, while russians tends to be in the heart of action directly).
Common people shouldn't mess with what they know nothing about, and stay at their "Consumer" position.

I hear a lot that doing competitive programming is important to land jobs and that it would improve your ability to solve problems, however; I hate it and I suck at it so much. I don't see improvement except for knowing how to solve a certain problem and I forget about it after some time.

I can't stand doing any kind of abstract, unrealistic problem solving for whatever reason. I love solving real-world problems that actually matter and provide an actual value on the other hand.

To all the electronic amateurs out there (especially @Condor since he's the only one I remember well en) :
- What model of soldering iron do you use for precise work?
- What would you recommend to someone who's wanting to try theirself without paying too much too early?
- What are the features or spec to look for when you buy one (even as a debutant) ?

I've got one but it's more suited to gross work and I'd really love to try myself to electronic fiddling.
If you have any advice, resource, tuto kit to make my first arms, I'll take anything!

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.

Aside building Projects, which is your best bet to learn a new language?

Videos or Books ( including articles, posts etc).

Which is your best bet?

A certain person deserves nothing better than the signs of the tires of a full-speed heavy truck tatooed on her face (even though, I admit, it could be an improvement to the overall aesthetic). Especially when she wants to push the office (1 week before the vacations and with no real urgency, while there a tons of other jobs that are way more urgent) to modify one by one some field in the data of 5500 customers only because SHE (and only she) has a bonus, when everything could be solved with a fucking simple sql update and we only need a simple approval for that from the company of the project management software. All of this while she spends the time planning her own vacations in internet, or complaining about EVERYTHING, including the colour of the icons of her pdf reader (30 min complaints about a stupid icon). Responsible my ass.

I think motivation and constant improvement are the biggest challenges, but I guess these are applicable to life in general. On a dev prespective one of the biggest challenges was the jump from college work to job work. The professional environment brings some responsibilities that in college you just don't have. Good side, in most cases, when you get home you don't have to think about it.

1. Sum up all the behaviours/functionalities the program should have
2. break each functionality down to the data/procedures that it uses(mindmaps can help)
3. get an understanding of a naive implementation and implement it (fast)
4. collect improvement opportunities (opitimization/simplification/expansion) and get a deeper understanding of the solution
5. spend a few days on some real life issues
6. improve the naive code, if appropiate, start all over

You can talk for a lifetime of improvement, but what can you do when your boss sits near you and dictates his changes to the app you're working on?

Don't forget, this changes are on the opposite place of good common sense, interface guidelines (iOS and material) and TASTE.

Trying to run an esp-32 as a ros node. Time wasted without any improvement: 1 day

"We can't install the latest Win 10 features and security improvement on your PC due to low disk space."

Time to clear up.
Should I delete my hands and feet too?
: /

- Get much better with Python
- Finish one of my relatively large side projects
- Try to be less annoyed by other humans
- Focus more on self improvement
- Get into some hardware programming.
- Just generally sort my shit out. Trying to get a mid-level/senior job within the next 4 years which is going to be a fucking challenge.

Just need to vent out a bit. There's already been a few times at work where the senior developer asks me why I take so long to do something, and I'm unable to fully explain why.

Now, I could think of several reasons. Maybe it's my lack of experience; I just start researching on Google for solutions, start putting things together, and then I guess things start to get too complicated for me to be able to explain clearly. Maybe I end up "over-engineering" to solve problems that could be solved in a simpler way.

And this leads to my second reason, and that is there's no code review going on. I've wanted to just tell him, "If you'd just take a long look at my code, you'd understand why it's taking me so long! So you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong, or if I'm making it too complicated!" But, of course, being the junior developer, I also think that when he's explaining how to do something, I'm just not understanding it right.

I could ask for clarifications, and believe I've done that on some things, but my third reason is that he's just not good at explaining things, or that there's some miscommunication happening. English isn't his first language. His English is ok, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement. I also notice that our other co-workers are also having a bit of a hard time but it seems they already developed some sort of adaptation to communicate with him.

So yeah, there's my rant, and I'd love to know everyone's input on this.

Does devrant has a trello where the community can write improvement ideas, request features and other stuff? I think it's a good idea if it doesn't exist yet. @dfox

>People ranting about Whatsapp not adding features
>Whatsapp adds a feature
>People ranting about the feature whatsapp have just add

And this happen all the fucking time. When the double-check turned blue and in almost all major improvement they've made

Am I the only one who likes the new feature?

Peace guys, I don't want to start a telegram vs Whatsapp war here :P

There is one mistake that I keep doing all over again...

First of all, there is a task I don't like. Therefore I start thinking about writing a script for it.
I write a quick solution and it does not work!

I am allways ending up with spending ways to much time on the given task...

Can someone please tell me why?

I have to put together a "performance improvement plan" for a senior dev today. Not the best part of this job.

Context:
At work, I code primarily with Java.

I'm a big believer in the mantra, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I find myself conflicted with that when I can see how much of an improvement it would be to use a different language for some of the simple pieces in our integration.

Question:
When should one start considering other languages for your team? And if you choose other options, how do you do it in such a way where you don't end up building a chimera of an integration?