So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

I'm sick of how much abuse PHP gets from other programming communities. PHP written well, using PHP 7 is comparatively quick. yes it has its quirks, just like JavaScript, but just because you can do stuff in multiple ways, and the language has a few inconsistencies doesn't make it a bad language. The recursive flag in bash applications changes case inconsistently (I.e. zip and cp) but that doesn't get bashed (lol) half as much....

I think I need to finish my coffee this morning

I come from PHP and have been using jQuery as a crutch for years. I've dabbled in Node and obviously writing some vanilla JS is unavoidable, but now I'm starting to use ES6 with Babel and VueJS and the more I dig in, the more I hate javascript. Everything is an object (null, array), there seems to be a few gotchas with math (including the one pictured), nothing is strongly typed but types are very important (for instance, you can't loop an object and an array using the same code), and there are a lot of inconsistencies/functions missing. ucwords for instance. Why doesn't that exist? typeof only returns object, but Array.isArray and Object.isObject work fine. I'm going to give typescript a go soon and cross my fingers.

Why is starting a C++ project so overly complicated and annoying?!

So many different compilers. So many ways to organize the files. So many inconsistencies between Linux and Windows. So many outdated/lacking tutorials. So many small problems.

Why is there almost no good C++ IDEs? Why is Visual Studio so bizarre? Why are the CMake official tutorials literally wrong? Why can't we have a standard way to share binaries? Why can't we have a standard way to structure project folders? Why is the linker so annoying to use?

Don't get me wrong, I quite like the language and I love how fast it is (one of the main reasons I decided to use it for my project, which is a game almost comparable to Factorio)... But why is simply starting to write code such a hassle?

I've been programming in Java for years and oh god I miss it so much. JARs are amazing. Packages are amazing. The JDK is amazing. Everything is standardized, even variable names.

I'm so tempted to make this game in Java...

But I can't. I would have a garbage collector in the way of its performance...

Half way through a 2 hour deployment, and a fucking test fails.
Yes, it takes 2+hours to run the tests.

Rerun in test environment: pass
Rerun in prod: pass
Rerun changed test in prod: fail..

Why, why you got to hate me for?
I love it when production is the place where config gets changed.

I'm glad I handed in my notice. So long, client-database-update.xlsx. I will never again have to suffer your absurd inconsistencies

Name a more iconic duo than web developers on help sites and having pissing contests over which modules they use instead of actually answering the question!

I've been a web dev/server admin for all of about a month now, and only known PHP for about a week of that, and the one thing really that grates on me isn't PHP's odd function naming inconsistencies or at times outright trash documentation, it's the other developers who, when asked a fairly straightforward question about why a mysqli function won't return something, demand you use PDO instead.

Please. I'm running a LEMP stack on a Raspberry Pi here, I'm trying to keep dependencies to an absolute minimum because the SD card is tiny, the Pi will catch on fire if it runs any hotter, and more dependencies are more potential points of failure. Just answer the damn question. I'm not going to install PDO for something I know I can do anyway just because it makes my code look slightly prettier.

Honourable mention to all you Node.js developers out there too, with your thousands of useless npm dependencies. I salute you.

Just learned that yesterday someone suggested putting the dev team on "workspace", when I was on leave.

My first question, "what the hell is workspace?"
"It's a remote environment..."
Okay I get it. Are you kidding me? Doing development on remote desktop?

My second question, "Why the hell did someone suggest that?"
"We have had issues with devs using MySQL but the target prod will be using PostgreSQL. That caused issues, inconsistencies... And we found some issues after deployment."

Okay so much for DB agnostic. I called it out that everyone now install PostgreSQL on local. Problem solved, hopefully.

Why we had MySQL in the first place? Yes DB agnostic is one of the reason. The other being I'm more familiar with MySQL so it's quicker to perform tasks (like "can you clone that environment for me" and "can you fix the data on XYZ"). But that's trivial.

Just some ridiculous suggestion that set me off.

Annoying git cli inconsistencies:

git branch --list
git stash list

Lost count of the times I have entered

git branch list

I hate that they're rebranding the newest Windows update "Windows 11"... it's been 5-6 years since they said Windows 10 was the last version of their OS. Why not drop the numbering convention all together? Also, why is the latest update a pile of crap that changes nothing other than the UI? Oh right, because the perception of progress to investors is the sole goal... I swear there is so much broken in windows 10 right now that they haven't fixed and so much more to be added, including file explorer tabs which they've literally started implementing and stopped at some point. Don't even mention the numerous UI inconsistencies between right clicks, color inconsistencies, still using control panel for some options in windows 11? UWP apps crash constantly and are slower and laggier than traditional .exe's, the list goes on and on for why this is the dumbest decision microsoft has made yet. problem is, "yet" is the keyword.

Stupid node and all its package version inconsistencies...

what grinds my balls ? DATA INCONSISTENCIES!!! what the fuck did people think proliferating bad data futher into the abyss of existence!!!

Not exactly a dev enemy, but similar.
A new radiation protection regulation has been in force in Germany since 2019. October I finished a super duper important document for this and this has been with the TÜV ever since. First there is nothing happening and then there are allegedly inconsistencies in it, which, however, all of which were due to shoddy work with the "expert."

There is a german word for this type of person: Krümelkacker.
He faults every little thing in side-by-page letters, causes long delays, and in the end is often wrong.
But I have to work with him -.-

"Hey guys, we should start using ESLint. It's a popular linter. There's 13,000+ styling inconsistencies it could streamline using `--fix`"

"Yeah... But these errors, they're not really errors, right? So, we don't need to fix them."

...

1. I never said they were errors. Do you know how a linter works?
2. Sure, I guess being consistent and familiar are overrated qualities of a codebase. Carry on!

TL;DR

Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.

So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.

After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.

We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.

Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...

Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.

Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?

Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic

10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house

FUCKING CSS and browser inconsistencies.

Trying to make a simple static site but these fucking browsers are making it so hard I want to program console application instead.

Also for some reason mobile Firefox don't give the right window height and width fuck everything.

Hi everyone, I'm a now second year computer science student. I have read through posts on Dev Rant for a while now and have loved every minute of it. I really wanted to start contributing to this awesome community and thought a question might be a good start. There seems to be a ton of inconsistencies among certain terms. The biggest that really grinds my gears is how people refer to "()", "[]", and "{}". I personally refer to the first set as parenthesis, the second as brackets, and the third as braces. Throughout my time at this college and around the internet I have read some people say curly braces, curly brackets, squigly brackets, round brackets, square braces, and my personal favorite "those curvy round things". Other students do this which is understandable, but it seemed strange that even my professors use them interchangeably. So is there a naming convention anywhere that might help with this issue or somewhere I can get some clarification?

after aprox ~1 year of using ubuntu with gnome and countless UI inconsistencies (and not to mention memory leaks left and right) I finally gave up and successfully managed to hackintosh my work laptop ... here's another reason why :(

i hate you, you and you AHHHHHH

This doesnt have to make sense.
This is a freakin rant for god's sake, not a pull request. I'm not tryna be the best ranter?? Dont mind this rant. Just scroll. B if u can only hear my scream right now from the other side of the world, it sure can cause another big bang.

F u, this sht, (oh ya it's profanity, i got no better term for what im feelin, gahh please rip my head off) and that too, and this one too, all of u

I HATE ALL OF YOU. I BLAME ALL OF YOU FOR ALL MY INCONSISTENCIES. YE, IM TIRED OF TAKING ACCOUNTABILITY. F THAT SHT COZ IT JUST RAISES EXPECTATIONS. I CAN'T EVEN MEET THE DEADLINES I SET FOR MYSELF.

The hell are ambitions and all that "dream life" they tryna sell. Those won't even matter when I can barely get my sht together. UGH. I haven't even seen my friends, the SUN, trees and all normal people things. Dang, I want fried chicken. I haven't had one for a while. I guess I should end this rant here and order one.

I must just be hungry, no?

I have working on a new website for a client that interfaces with their internal systems, meaning we must collect the data fields required by the client. A look over the designs reveals such huge inconsistencies in the data input that we may as well not have bothered designing it.

For current project, client provided us with ui design and postman collections and expects us to build application based on that. I'm currently onsite, working from client's offices, trying to communicate what each api does and what they expect. And they're fucking avoiding me. Roll eyes if meeting lasts more than a fuckin hour. Laugh when we point out inconsistencies in tgeir design.
The fug? You're paying us to do the job. We don't fucking care, it won't be finished till you provide enough information.

Google's PageSpeed is recommending that I reduce the size of a 109kb photographic image to 2kb, which would definitely reduce its size...to a blurry, pixelated mess. Is it all just robots over there programming this stuff now? Doesn't anyone know how to sanity check their code around these types of logical inconsistencies?

I want to rant about 14yo me approaching css, cause I feel a lot like lately I am ranting a lot (irl mostly) and forgot we all start humbly.

- Be 14 yo me and start learning css
- Spend two hours trying to make a css file work
- Get angry at the file (the 14yo me lost his cool a lot) and say css is stupid
- Realise 1 and l have the same representation in the current font
- get bright red
- change that letter
- all works
- hide the face in the pillow and feel stupid
- no, I meant really stupid

Btw 14yo me you were right, css IS stupid, mostly due to inconsistencies and IE

tl;dr i am proud of my universal program but annoyed it won't get appreciation.

<brag type='slightly'>the last three days i refactored my various snippets to a kind of modular and scalable software package. restricted to a rigid company system i make use of the technologies i feel confident in. so i created a javascript app that can be used with internet explorer. it is a neat tool to work smarter and mainly to make repetitive writing tasks efficient using predefined textblocks that have automated linguistic adjustments and are multilingual usable. after refactoring it is possible to extend any desired functionality by just adding another module. i learned a lot about implementing separated data structures, data processing, output and asynchronous script loading (and the annoying limitations of ie11).</brag>

i kept in mind that this tool might not only help my personal duties to be done more efficient but also might come in handy to all my colleagues having similar tasks to do. the downside is my colleagues having irrational computerphobia and i know for sure they will proceed to do these repetitive writings manually resulting in inconsistencies and an inefficient time management. while my wise wife tries to convice me that at least i had fun coding this stuff and having it supporting me with annoying tasks, it still bothers me being the only user, as it means no progression for the company. it riddles me how the colleagues, acknowledging us all being craftspeople in the first place, avoid use of computers whenever possible and rather rely on medieval working flows.

i find it quite amusing to be the 'can you fix my printer'-guy, but i just cannot handle this attitude. and everyone complains about having so much to do. get your shit together and start clicking these few buttons goddammit!

I had a discussion with my colleagues about my bachelor thesis.

Together we created within the last 18 month a REST-API where we use LDAP/LMDB as database (tree structured storage). Of course our data is relational and of course we have a high redundancy there. It's a 170 call API and I highly doubt that it's actually conforming REST.
Ensuring DB integrity is done in the backend and coding style there is "If we change it at one place, let's make sure to also change it everywhere else", so you get a good impression how much of spaghetti code we have there.

Now I proposed to code a solution in my bachelor thesis where we use a relational database (we even have an administrated Oracle DB with high availability) and have a write-only layer to also store the data in LDAP but my colleagues said that "it would add too much complexity to the system".
Instead I should write the relational layer myself and fetch the data somehow from the existing LDAP tree.

What the actual fuck, spaghetti code is what makes the system really unnecessarily complex so that no one will understand that code in 2 years.

Congratulations, you just created legacy code that went into production in 2018 while not accepting the opportunity to let that legacy code get eliminated.
Now good luck with running and maintaining that system and it's inconsistencies.

I was tasked to parse some complex output oft another application so that it can be displayed nicely in our Frontend. The output had lots of inconsistencies and exceptions - I spent the entire fucking day to wrote the craziest regex I have ever written in my entire life. With a few minor issues it worked pretty well. I was happy... Then a colleague came into my room, peeked into my screen..
Him: "You are aware you can just specify a --json flag to get json output?"
Me: "..."

*long silence*
Me: 😵🔨

Please end my life.

Programmer: Type type(2);
C++ Compiler: // Okay, I'll use the constructor that takes 1 argument
Programmer: Type type();
C++ Compiler: // I see there is a constructor that takes no arguments, but surely you don't want that. Everybody loves functions, a function shall be declared!

Who, in their right mind, thought this syntax is a good idea?! Syntax inconsistencies drive me crazy...

Seriously Pope Gregory you couldn't make a more consistent calendar? We have extra days why does February have 28 still. Making my calendars program repeat events infinitely more complicated. (Do not get me started on date format inconsistencies). Thats it I'm staying single getting too afraid of the word 'date'.

everybody nags about php inconsistencies, but have you tried excel vba scripting and adressing a1 vs r1c1 notation regarding ranges and names? pure horror.

Floating point numbers! 😖

Writing geometric algorithms for CNC machining... you'll find those 10th decimal place inconsistencies real quick!

#define SOAPBOX

Data will contain errors and inconsistencies, and the only player that can detect them is: the computer itself.

if the computer detects that it is in a situation where it cannot meaningfully continue, it should not allow itself to continue.

Only the computer can make that determination.

If the software does not aggressively test its data, it is usually impossible to determine whether the problem is with the software or with the data or both.

Per contra, if it does do so, it becomes impossible to assert that the input data does not contain the issues that are being tested for ... a very important thing to be able to say in a real-world production setting, where hundred-megabyte input files are common.

#undef SOAPBOX

I've been asked to release a project which has been written by someone else, then rewritten by another developer, and both have left the company.

I can't release it yet because there is an inconsistent bug throwing some values out.

We've got it running side by side with an older legacy system which it's going to replace. Before the 2nd developer left they added some logging to our live system to record both values so that they could be monitored to make sure there was no inconsistency.

There are some inconsistencies... however, when I run the same data through the new system and the legacy system in a test environment they both come out correct.

FML

I've considered quitting...

I am new to redis and confused how this works

To keep it simple lets say i have a CRUD service for user

- POST user, just creates user

- GET user by id, fetches user but using annotation @CacheEvict(). This method has a Thread.sleep(3000) before fetching user

- GET all users, fetches all users but using annotation @Cacheable()

- PUT user by id, updates a single with annotation @CacheEvict(). This method has a Thread.sleep(3000) before fetching user

- DELETE user by id, deletes a single user with annotation @CacheEvict()

---

GOOD:

When i GET user by id, i wait 3 seconds and then get the fetched user

When i GET user by id again, i get the fetched user instantly in 5 ms. This means it has pulled the user from REDIS cache instead of postgres

---

PROBLEM:

If i PUT user by id, update some data, and then if i GET user by id, it will return the user in 5 ms BUT the outdated user! Not the newly updated one. Because the Redis cache configuration has not expired yet. So there are now data inconsistencies

---

QUESTION:

How can i know When was something updated, deleted or whatever, so that i can fetch data from postgres (latest data) instead of Redis cache (outdated data)?

I'm new to Python and have been using PyCharm. I like it. I've tried just about every IDE on the market now excluding maybe a couple of the ones who don't have free versions and I always end up back to Pycharm.

I like how it's strict about formatting. My opinion it builds good habits. I watch a lot of tutorials on youtube among other things and I'm learning slowly but still I getting there.

My conclusion is that their seems to be a complete lack of consistency in the Python community regarding PEP and formatting standards. One person does it this way. Another does it that way. Makes it extremely frustrating when trying to learn because you have all these people doing things slightly different.

One guy says dont use camelCase another says yes. Granted some of these tutorial are a couple of years old and I know things change but I can't imagine it changes that much from 2 to 3 yeah but when you can't even be consistent with your spacing of your print functions or comments it's like nails on a chalkboard.

And thats just the beginning. I'm a tabs guy some are spaces. That's a whole other rant or whatever. Hardly the point really. Lots of different inconsistencies but I'm running out of characters.

Maybe im just not finding good videos. They all act like they know what they are doing and to an extent I suppose they do.

It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out their like they do ready to be scrutinized so you have to at least have a clue of what your doing. Some of these people have 10s of thousands of subs and I find myself picking apart every little thing they are doing and find many times they are teaching wrong standards. At least that's how I see it from the little experience I have now.

I'm just beyond frustrated and would appreciate any advice that a person wants to give. Keep in my I'm new and may just be misguided so try not to be to harsh if I've drawn an incorrect conclusion.

So at the moment, I'm currently reviewing the API specifications that got written up as the other developers haven't bothered to update it themselves. When you think about it, that's kind of dumb. If you are in charge of a particular function, it should be your responsibility to maintain documentation.

Anyway I'm cross referencing to what I see that has been done in the source code and finding way too many inconsistencies across specifications and implementations. Even parts where they have the exact same data, the structures are completely different. Or some parts have been documented but are not in the implementation, or vice versa. SO I can't tell which is the correct one!

I received a job posting recently which has php in it, I decided to avoid it for multiple reasons, but it got me thinking: why do companies seriously believe that php is "easy to learn/use/pick up"? It has an horrible syntax, a lot of inconsistencies and lacks functionalities... Is there something I am not seeing?