Was asked to help a team of interns in a remote country, finish an app. Not only were they terrible at literally every aspect of development, but were arrogant and argued their "new" ways were right.

Spent weeks on the project being nice, trying to help them, sending them links to standards and documents, pointing out unit tests shouldn't be failing, everyone needs to have the same versions of the tools etc. You know, basic shit.

Things got quite heated a few weeks in when they started completely ignoring me. Shit was breaking all over the place and crashing, as I thought we were going to build it one way, and they went and built it another.

Was practically begging the team architect and my manager for help dealing with them. Only reply I got was the usual "were aware of the problem and looking into it" bullshit.

Eventually after the app was done, a mutual agreement was reached that the 2 teams would split (I maintain they were kicked out). All the local devs were happy, managers had mentioned how difficult they were and it would be great for us to finally work on our own.

So I thought everything was fine ... until my end of year performance review came along.

Seems I'm quite poor at "working with others" and I "don't try hard enough with others", it was clear I was struggling with the remote team and "made no effort".

WELL FUCK RIGHT OFF

Not being cocky, but I've never had anything like that in a performance review for the past 7 years. I'm a hard worker, and never have trouble making friends with colleagues. Everyone in the country complained about these remote fuckers, even the manager, who I begged for help. And the end result is I need to work harder.

I came in early, stayed late to fit their timezone, took extra tasks, did research for them, wrote docs. And I was told to work harder.

Only reason I didn't quit, was my internal transfer request was approved lol. New team is looking at projects orders of magnitude more impressive, never been happier.

PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

Alright so I have to create an API that communicates with a web interface and three different back end systems. And I think my customer might have thought that I am actually Jesus because they didn't have any docs for their systems and their policy did not allow me to gain access to their internal testing environment (which. Drove. Me. NUTS) and expected me to create this API by pure guesswork basically. After teaching the customer's internal IT guy how to capture requests between the systems I managed to somehow got the prototype working. I am proud and sleepy. ... Mainly sleepy

Well this is the thing. I have been starting to replace a lot of my shit with Golang. I think it is a great language because of one small fact: it is a boring language.

With this I don't mean that it is not incredibly fun to use. It is and honestly I feel that a lot of the concepts that I had from C passed quite nicely with some additions. The language does not do anything special and there is no elegant code. It works in a very procedural fashion without taking into consideration any of the snazzy things found in JS, Python, c# etc etc. Interfaces and struct make sense to me, way more than oop does in other languages. I don't need generics with the use of interface parameters and I have hadly found a situation in which I have to strive too far away from the way things are done with Go to be happy with it, then again my projects are not hard or by any means groundbreaking (most of them deal with logistics or content management and a couple of financial apps that I am rewriting in Go from work)

The outcome is fast and easy to read since idiomatic go is for the most part very readable(no people...single letter variable names are by no means a standard and they should feel ashamed from it)

I miss the idea of a framework, but not so much and the docs and internal code for Go is just way top inviting. I believe the code to be readable enough than anyone that has gotten used to the syntax and ideas of the language can just jump in and start learning. This is the first language that I have learnt from studying the code as it is inside of the standard lib, the same I cannot say for any other language or framework.

Also, it play beautifully nice with vs code.

I dunno man, I feel that I am doing something wrong. I have projects built in Node, php, python, ruby and spring java as well as .net core and I still find Golang way more appealing simply because it goes harder than Python with "one preferred way" to do things.

The lang does not make me feel like a pro, i certainly develop in it at pro speeds, but it was made with beginners in mind to built fast and concurrent apps, with the most minimal syntax possible.

I guess my gripe with it is that it gets shunned from this, saying that it ignored years of lang research to make it as dumbed down as possible. Which it did, lack of generics amongst other things certainly make it seem like, but I will not say that it was poorly designed. Not at all, I believe it is a testament of amazing engineering. To be able to create such a simple yet amazingly powerful language.

Wish there were more to it. Wish there was a nice gui lib or a ml framework comparable to the ones offered by python and java. But I guess such things will come with time.

I feel stupid with this language.

And that is fine.

I found a budget salary for dev with 4-5 YOE in 2011 in my company, digging through internal old docs.
Assuming 2% increase per year, the 2023 budget salary is now EUR 15k more than what average dev get in my company.

I remember that someone mentioned similar thing in other socmed where he found through internal docs, salary for his position 10 years ago and now are the same, totally neglecting inflation.
On the other hand house/property values has doubled within 10 years.

How can we pressure companies to give us appropriate salary?
When I ask for increase, they will just say no because it's the market rate, but the market rate sucks.

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

What kind of software you guys use for internal documentation? Currently we use Dropbox paper but I'm having doubts about it and I'd like to hear some suggestions.
It must support markdown (syntax highlighting would be nice) and I'd like it to be cloud hosted and free or at least cheap :)

I'm not explicitly looking for an alternative but should an awesome suggestion appear I'd switch over.

Best documentation have probably been most language docs and references I've worked with, official or otherwise, especially C++. Completeness, consistency, tidiness and examples really help a lot, since I know I can rely on the docs for basically any problem and makes work so much easier since I'll be guaranteed to leave understanding what's up.

Worst documentation has got to be the internal docs we had to create for a seven-man uni project, you couldn't find shit in the sea of docs that were out of date or just plain wrong. It was so much easier to ask whoever was working on that part about the intricacies of the cobbled-together mess than to either read the code or the docs. One absolute mouthbreather was working on the database docs and put in that it stored ArrayLists. Fucking Java ArrayLists in a motherfucking database. One day I am going to rant so hard about this dumbass and it's gonna be a spectacle.

Bonus points goes to the company's public documentation at my internship. It was good and pretty complete, but sometimes there was a document from 2 years ago that had been written by a non-english speaker that was absolutely awful. Some of them were so bad that as soon as I'd finished learning what I needed to, my mentor told me to go and fix the docs, I don't blame him.

The fucking Unity Transport Layer API documentation is horrible! There's a bunch of information missing, and whenever I try to send data I just get a "NoResources" error. All the docs say about that one is: "No internal resources ro acomplish request.", nothing on forums or google... Worst part is, I've not even started dev that long and Unity has already given me quite some trouble. I hope that's just inexperience, and not Unity being a bitch.