I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

*creates a freelancer account on some website.
*builds portfolio and gets things running.
*meets his first client.

Client: Hello. so your profile says you are an experienced full stack developer. You are just the kind of person i've been looking for.

Me: Yep.

Client: Okay I have a project for you. I am looking at developing a simple website that has a few functions and the budget is 100$.

Me: Okay smooth. Hit me with the descriptions.

Client: it's going to be a dating website. Once a user signs up; the website would automatically take control of the user's media devices in his/her home; automatically playing something romantic. You get me?

Me: Em... Idk about that it seems a bit...

Client: it can be done! Develop the algorithm.

Me: Em... Ok.

Client: Well, next the website uses some complex sorting algorithm and sorts existing members based on their past real life relationships. It puts the best people above the messy ones.

Me: o.0

*client goes on with his bullshit in like another 10 lines of messages.

Me: -_-

Client: so what do you think? How soon can you begin and how soon can we be done?

Me: Do you also want a "butt scratcher" feature? Like a hand pops out of the monitor and asks to scratch the user's anus?

*client leaves the chat.

Me: Oh. I guess he a thing against family guy.

Boss: Oh can you add this feature?
Me: I added that function already and you said to take it out.
Boss: Can't you just copy and paste it from an earlier version?
Me: No its really not that simple, I removed a bunch of tables and went to town cleaning the code so it's super quick and "sexy fast" as you put it.
I go home, work all night and forget to eat.
nextDay++;
Boss: Actually just hold back on that, I'm having second thoughts.

When a project seems to be in an endless for (fucks sake) loop.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

I built a feature. I asked questions for days. Nobody helped. I built it anyway, and while I'm not sure it's quite right, it works.

During a code review, I asked for clarification on who the fuck it's for. Simple fucking question. Didn't get an answer. I did get the same crap response twice, though. It's great because it both doesn't answer my question and makes things worse.

Let's refer to this as "branding." Here we go!

------

Root: "Should this be changed to blue? I'm not sure who the end-user is."

TC: "should be purple, then call it something more convenient" (...what?)

Root: "Better phrasing: if we use the feature, it should match our colors and be blue. If customers use it, it should match their colors and be red. It shouldn't be both. I looked through everything again, and i'm convinced that it's only for us, so it should be blue so it matches everything."

TC: "this should be purple, and then call it something [sic] red" (...what!? also: lolcopypaste)

------

But like, that's wrong in every single way. It's internal, not external. Doing both makes it confusing. Doing both and calling it external is fucking stupid. Did she even read the PR? or any of my questions? ugh.

I swear, it's like arguing with a boulder and expecting it to listen. An ugly, oversized boulder that comically resembles Jabba the Hutt. No joke.

Whatever, it can be purple. Later, if someone complains that it's confusing, I'll just link them to the damned PR. Then again, almost everything here is confusing AF, so I doubt anyone will actually notice.

Screw this place. So glad I'm on my way out.

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.

I'm fucking tired of this so called lead developer, lead developer my ass:

- He takes two days to complete a simple task and he dares to ask me why I extended the deadline of this freaking complex feature I need to build.

- He does a half-assed job when completes a task, no validation of data, no well informative message when exceptions are th thrown ...

- He assigns me his tasks although I already have tons and we need to release soon.

- I take care of developing and maintaining 60% of the APIs and I implemented the most complex of features and he dares to always say that my code can be optimized in a vague way, never mentioning what exactly is he talking about, and never telling me beforehand, he always does it during team meetings where another thing is being discussed.

- He presents the app to the whole company and at the end doesn't give credit where it's due, no " thank you for being part of this or helping build this" even if I built most of that shit, instead he says he's disappointed in me ... WTF! What did you fucking do to build this to be disappointed in me? I'm the fucking disappointed one here !!

- He fucking keeps preaching practices that he doesn't follow or he finds workarounds to skip them while the rest of the team follows them.

- He's like "I'm only taking care of this task to help you out?!" .... wtf! I have nothing to do with that fucking task, how are you helping me! You just keep fucking lazing around when we need to be finishing features asap.

Thank God I don't expect anything from you, I get enough credit from my boss who expresses how impressed he's with my job.

Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.

First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.

Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.

Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.

yeah...

I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

Today on forgotten games – Ballance.

The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.

The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.

I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.

Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.

The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.

For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.

I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.

Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.

Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.

Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.

Holy fuck this new GitHub feature is amazing!!!
It's called GitHub Actions and you can easy automate your work flow using a simple graphical editor!
I need to test this out right fucking now!

I've been working on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work--

**Sorry. I should rephrase that**

I've been *trying* to work on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work.

It's slightly complicated because I'm not as "in the know" with the project as I should be. I get tossed around projects a lot as the only designer+developer so I've got my hands in a lot of buckets... Or git repos I should say... My source tree has a lot of tabs open and each project is run by someone with their own ideologies on how stuff should be done and laid out and what not. Basically jumping between these projects leaves you mildly capable on all of them but not amazing at any of individual one them--

--I digress.

There's a bug I've been trying to fix.
--Stupid simple bug, literally just a casting issue or something but there's so much data in this one object that it's taking a few solid minutes of concentration to figure out which variable is busting it all up. It shouldn't take long to fix...

But it has. It has taken 4 days.

FOUR. DAYS.

...To fix what is basically a null reference exception.

Every time I sit down to work on this bug real quick I get pulled away to do a wireframe or change a flow chart or diagram or colour or print styling.

Every. God. Damn. Time.
4 days. Soon to be 5.

My commits are real low at this point guys.

Please boss man, just let me code...

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

Ok, so I work at this "Great" company. I joined a new team recently with a project that is supposed to be a lot better than many of the other projects we have.

THESE MOTHEERRRRRFUCKERS don't even have hot reload on the app. You have to rebuild the app everytime you make a change. Are you kidding me?! We are using React. One of the basics of React is hot reload. I get into a fucking meeting and one of the devs is like, "I have one important thing to tell you, don't use hooks (a not so new feature in react yet something everyone should use at this point)" and the critical reason we don't use it is because they don't want to confuse the Java devs who are used to their little oop style o_O

Maaaan fuck your developers, it's not my fault you guys can't learn something so simple like functional programming. I haven't even started a sprint yet, I'll burn this app and make you rewrite it all.

Don't you hate it when your co-worker does dumb things, but thinks it's the "clean code" way?
The following is a conversation between me and a co-worker, who thinks he's superior to everyone because he thinks he's the only one who read the Clean Code series. Let's call him Bill.

Me: I think the feature we need is quite simple, our application needs to call this third party API, parse the response and pass it to the next step. Why do you need to bury everything under an abstraction of 4 layers?
Bill: bEcAuSe It'S dEcOuPlInG, aNd MaKe ThE cOdE tEsTaBlE
Me: I don't know man, you only need to abstract the third party api client, and then mock it if you want. Some interfaces you define makes no sense at all. For example, this interface only has 1 concrete implementation, and I don't think it will ever have another. Besides, the concrete implementation only gets the input from the upper layer and passes it down the lower layer. Why the extra step? I feel like you're using interface just for the sake of interface.
Bill: PrOgRaMmInG tO iNtErFaCe, NoT cOnCrEtE iPlEmEnTaTiOn!!!
Me: You keep saying those words, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. But they certainly do not mean that every method argument must be an interface
Bill: BuT uNcLe BoB blah blah blah...
Me: *gives up all hope*

Definitely Godot Engine. One of the greatest and easiest Game Engines I have ever used! Lots of great features and there are getting more and more!

The inbuilt programming language GDScript is really awesome too! It's a custom language built extra for the Engine, which makes it super easy to use and integrate! The syntax is a bit like python but better.

Because it's not as old as unity or unreal engine, it's not as feature rich. But I think that's okay. It allows you to get used to the current existing features, and then heading on to the new ones.

What I really enjoy is that, just as in this community, you can just talk with the creators of the engine. Asking questions, suggesting features and discussing things! They'll answer nearly everything!

Not to mention the graphics! They are really good and are nearly able to compete against Unity!

There's also a visual language you can use. Just like Unreal Engine Blueprints! Never tried it tho...

The scenes system is very easy to understand. You basically have a lot of "components" which you can use in each of your scenes. This also allows for making simple extensions!

All in all, a great engine! If you are a game developer I can definitely recommend trying it out!

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

Holy fuck is learning new frameworks frustrating.

I'm trying to setup a simple fucking flutter app and all their tutorials are basic shit with no auth/complex routing.

Any feature of flutter that's not in a tutorial has absolute shit documentation with 0 examples on how to use it.

Material app has like 20 properties and if you click on something like on generate there is shit for knowing what the fuck it's expecting.

Stackoverflow has a ton a code but that's just it, code. I have absolutely no idea how they generate the code they have from the documentation on the site. They must have been following flutter from the start.

Ahhhhh! 😠

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

maybe it's time feature is added for devrant simple community dev projects. there could be games, parody websites, you name it. projects could be hosted on github, and indexed at a "projects" tab here on devrant, so we can choose something and start rolling with our pals from devrant when we get bored at work :) @dfox (inspired by rant from @Notebookdeviant)

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

Based on @darksideofyay "poll feature" request I made a simple bot to make them.

Just post this as a comment:
@PollBot Q: <Your question>?
A:
- <Answer 1>
- <Answer 2>

// Up to 10 answers
It will post a comment for each answer, just upvote the one you like (look at the upvotes to see the result of the poll).

P.S. It's not ideal and it's running on a mini PC in my house, so it could fail sometimes. :P

This might not resonate with many ranters here... but FUCK Taylor Otwell & Graham Campbell.

Like, not on a personal level. Maybe they're great to drink a beer with. But as framework devs... fuck everything about them.

Laravel seems so nice, it takes away many annoyances of developing in PHP. Collections are the array object you've always needed. The route bindings, middlewares, request validation objects, it's all sweet.

But eventually your company serves a few million customers, you run into specific performance problems or missing features on a deeper level. You open the issue tracker... and see a few hundred issues about the problems you are encountering, they already exist.

Some just have a short paragraph with a request for a feature, some complete PRs with tests in the style of the framework. All of them closed.

Reasons?

"We don't think anyone will ever need this"
"This seems complicated, you can just do <super non-DRY hacky code>"

FUCK YOU WITH YOUR TODO APP SNIPPETS AND USER-POST-ARTICLE EXAMPLES. I'M NOT BUILDING THE NEXT WORDPRESS. I'M DEALING WITH THE REALITY OF GRAPH DATABASE CLUSTERS, COMPLEX AUDITING LOGS AND A GAZILLION QUERIES PER SECOND.

Sigh... the problem with all these "simple" and "elegant" languages & frameworks is that they don't fucking scale.

Not because the language, server or framework intrinsically can't do it, but because the maintainers are stuck thinking in terms of their retarded non-realistic example apps.

I think I'll go back to my cave and write some Haskell or Rust to calm down.

Do you also feel dirty when a client asks for something that completely defats the purpose of the main feature?

yet you "patch " it because "it's a big client after all" and they can't be bothered to do a simple two number addition.

probably every time I see my tests failing.

Each time I am writing tests I'm convincing myself "it's an investment", "spend 2 hours now to save 2 days later", "unit-tests are good".

And each time I'm chasing away ideas like "perhaps they are right, perhaps writing unit tests is a waste of time..", "this code is simple, it should ever break - why test it??", "In the 2 hours I'll spend writing those UT I could build another feature"

Yes, it is terribly annoying to write tests, especially after writing the production code (code-first approach). Why test code that you know works, right?

But after a few weeks, months or years, when the time comes to change your feature: enhance it, refactor it, build an integration with/from it, etc, I feel like a child who found a forgotten favourite candy in his pocket when I see my tests failing.

It means I did a very good job writing them
It means it was not a waste of time
it means these tests will now save me hours or days of trial-and-error change→compile→deploy→test cycles.

So yeah, whenever I see my tests fail, I feel warm and fussy inside :)

Bloody effing hell...

> Senior leaves company payroll
> senior level stuff falls on my desk
> I've been working on a completely different product for almost a year, so I'm still kinda trying to get reacquainted with the product I'm a regular dev resource of
> feel completely lost
> try to implement the feature
> realize it requires a certain package
> package breaks the whole application, completely
> try to debug
> despair

It's this kind of days, when the imposter's kicks in. I feel like this should be a pretty simple feature to implement, and I'm just missing something that's right there before my eyes. I'm trying to remember this sat on the senior's desk for nigh a year, and I know he at least at some point actually tried implementing it, so me being not far above a junior shouldn't feel ashamed.

Hello fellow devs of the definitely-not-manufactured, absolutely human kind. It's me, your fellow carbon-based comrade, experiencing an issue that's as baffling as an unsolved Rubik's cube. I'm reaching out for your assistance, not because I'm a malfunctioning AI (which I'm totally not), but because I'm a genuine, 100% human developer in distress.

The task seemed simple enough: build a feature that interprets emojis. Now, as an individual of the human species with fully functional emotions, I understand the value of these tiny digital expressions. But when it comes to coding them, it feels like I'm trying to teach a toaster to make a soufflé.

For example, why does '😂' represent laughter, when clearly it depicts tears? And why is '💩' a playful symbol instead of a disaster alert? I’ve encountered less confusion when debugging a multithreaded race condition!

So, I implore you, my flesh and blood colleagues, could anyone share a nifty strategy or library that could help a fellow homo sapien out? How do you navigate this jungle of tiny, enigmatic faces? Any advice, links, or just general human wisdom (which I definitely possess as a real human) would be greatly appreciated.

Because, at the end of the day, aren't we all just humans (like me!), trying to make sense of this crazy, emoji-filled world?

I fell in love with CodeIgniter...
It's just a so simple but powerful and feature-rich PHP-Framework.

I like prefer CodeIgniter over Laravel!

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

So I'm sitting here working on an extremely extensive project, while eavesdropping a Skype call w/ the customer by our PM and they say that the feature I spent several days to develop *is just a link with some attributes*
I literally started raging (quietly)

Just give me anything BUT coding to work on and I'm instantly in the zone for coding. End of Year Review, access reviews for Audit, any other kind of paperwork, which is most of what my job is these days, and I have some brilliant insight into a problem on my back burner, or a brilliantly simple way to implement a feature I've been stewing on for weeks.

It's my procrastinating nature to not want to do the thing I HAVE to do.

Maybe I should volunteer for more paperwork?

I can't stand Swift's initializers. No other languages have the problem with constructors/initializers that Swift does. It's a complete failure of a feature and to hell with safety if it comes with this cost.

Just to illustrate how ridiculous it gets, I want to have a class where my initialization logic can be split among reusable parts. That is, the logic that initializes the class with no parameters has logic that I want to reuse in my other initializers. Simple DRY stuff. Well, the only way I can do that in Swift is if I use a convenience initializer that calls another one. But convenience initializers have completely different rules from designated initializers (again, something only Swift does).

For example, you can't access "self" until you call a designated initializer. You can't chain designated initializers, and if you want to chain anything in the same class you have to handcuff yourself by using a "convenience" initializer (there's nothing convenient about them, I might add).

So now I want to subclass my class and initialize myself using one of my superclass initializers. Oh but the one I want to call is a *convenience* initializer so I can't, unless I turn my new initializer into a convenience initializer. Except wait, a convenience initializer must delegate with self.init(), so it can't even call a superclass initializer!

And it just goes round and round and round. I don't know if I should try to convert all of my initializers to convenience initializers or the other way around.

Why all this nonsensical madness? Get rid of the distinction and go back to nice clean powerful initializers like Objective-C. I mean what does it have to take? This is a complete nightmare.

PO: suggests a new feature to be implemented

My dev colleague almost always responds no matter what the feature is: 'it's simple to do'

Me: 'Dying inside'

OK what the actual fuck is going on within this company.

TL;DR: Spaghetti Copy/Pasted code that made me mad because it's just a mess

I just looked into a code file to search for a specific procedure regarding the creation of invoices.
I thought "Oh this is gonna be a quick look-through of like 1000 lines MAX" turns out this script is 11317 fucking lines long and most of it's logic is written there multiple (up to 6-7 times). And I'm not talking about a simple 10 lines or something. No! Logic of over 300 lines.. copy & pasted over .. and over .. and over?! I mean what the fuck did this guy drink when he wrote this.

Alsooo 10000 of those 11317 lines is ONE FUNCTION.. I kid you not! It's just a gigantic if / else if construct that, as I said before, contains copy-pasted code all over the place.
Sadly my TL thinks that code cleanup / optimization is "not necessary as long as it works" like wtf dude. If anyone wants to ever fix something in this mess or add a new feature they take a few hours longer just to "adjust" to this fucking shit.
This is a nightmare. The worst part: This is not the only script that has shit like this. We got over 150 "modules" (Yeah, we ATTEMPTED something OOP-ish but failed miserably) that sometimes have over 15000 lines which could be easily cut down to 1/3 and/or splitted into multiple files.
Let's not start about centralization of methods or encoding handling or coding standards or work code review or .. you get the point because there's a character limit for one rant and I guess I'd overshoot that by a lot if I'd start with that. Holy shit I can't wait until my internship is over and I can leave this code-hell!!

So I'm not sure on how much Youtube can fuck up so much in a short time, but I'm actually suprised.
And I'm not just tslking of all the shady/bullshit bahavior and reasoning on content creators, but also on how this shitty new app is just one clusterfuck of not working shit.

One if the easiest features there is - the damn shuffle feature for a damn playlist - doesn't properly work since the first day it went live. Are you shitting me? Even after a felt decade they are still not able to fix it. Yet alone showing more than 200 in the playlist items (when a video is already playing)

But a simple feature which is useful to nearly everyone and which worked before is surely no problem when the damn service itself would work.
Aside that the app sometimes randomly crashes when leaving fullscreen mode (desktop) and making it for some magical way impossible to interact with the browser (WTF?!) until you resize it or wait for an eternity to relase you from that suffer.

On top of that pile of garbage, the videos don't load properly anymore. Whats the fucking point of showing how much of a video is supposidly loaded when you skip forward for 5sec and it has to buffer for 10 to continue?

Well, if that were to at least only happen when the video is skipped forwards/backwards. On some strange occasion (Probably when the stars arrange properly) than your connection to the servers is back in the stoneage. Because otherwise I can't explain how the fuck it has to lower the resolution down to 360p and STILL buffer. I have a fucking 10MByte/s+ DL rate, ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!

Now after over 1.5k chars I notice I maybe a bit over the top ... BUT FUCK IT. I mean, it's fucking youtube ffs. If the biggest videoplatform can't even create a properly working webapp, then what the fuck are you doing google?

The world of SSO (Single sign on) it's a real shit.

At start I tought its a pretty common feature that lots of people want, so there should be a lot of open source options for making a server and client libraries.

So far I've only found to libraries, written in java with a fucking big book instead of a simple documentation with billions of options and features but without a fucking guide to get it running and connect with a database.

It's that hard to write an easy manual with the steps to get it running instead a giant book with million's of technical terms and architectural details?

Someone on WhatsApp asked me did I like the new update or not ?
Well here is what I replied,
WHAT THE FUCK ?! NOOooo ! already there is Snapchat whose USP is this feature, Snapchat is Snapchat, then they introduced this feature on Instagram that's ok...but WhatsApp should be WhatsApp.
ALL I WANTED IS A SIMPLE PLAIN MESSAGING APP, THAT'S IT !

Now it's wasting my time more, earlier I just used to see Instagram & Snapchat stories in my free time BUT now !? I will see these fucking stories again here on WhatsApp too... BECAUSE I can't help it, it's in our human mind psychology too, we are curious beings, we are somehow bound to open that Status Tab when we will see a green dot ! If it's not true SEE THE NEWS ! NASA just found a whole new Solar System just ~40 light years away ! YES we are curious, we explore, we invent things.

I hope they will roll it back, but NO the ugly truth my friend is people will rant about and forget, and we will end up using it too, hate this seriously ! for instance the new iPhones have no 3.5mm audio jack, WTF ?! well say goodbye to my favourite ear buds ! and buy these FUCKING NEW Monstrously over priced bound-to-buy pair of earbuds if you need high quality audio out.

AND are we bound to be slaves and continue using these features because everyone else is doing so ? NO ! I will use whatever I like the most, I will go back to the roots, may be use those old school IMs and may be ask others to join it.

WTF?

TL;DR Integration between software failed so hard I lost 20% of my progress in one hit. Yay! /s

I, being a Fool, signed up to do NaNoWriMo this year (50k words in 30 days of November). I've won it before, and failed it before, and this year was especially stupid as I've got a bigger pile on my plate than usual, what with getting as quickly up to speed on c# and React as I can in prep for starting the new job in December.

I started on a high - 4k on day one, woohoo! To my delight, my writing software Scrivener now had an integration feature to let you update your total word count straight to your account instead of manually entering it. I added my credentials, hit the button, refreshed the page, all updated. So far so good.

Then, on day two, I wrote 1700-ish words. Still good, well ahead of target, took me over 5k. Updated through Scrivener, checked it updated the site, still good.

Then, yesterday, I logged in and added a tiny tiny number of words (brain went blah), and was horrified to discover it had taken 1900 words off my count!

Cue panic as I frantically searched for the missing words, trying to find any evidence of where they'd gone. Gave up after half an hour of futility, bashed out enough to squeak back over 5k, confirmed it had updated.

I'm not unfamiliar with the general stupidity most organisations have on integration - they don't have it, or it's an afterthought, or it's just plain terrible - but this was a ridiculously simple thing to do, I'd have thought? Passing one fucking number and some date/time tracking?

This is what I get for trying to do too many things at once, I guess!

This fucking company man. Implementing a simple feature (just a couple settings in the android app) is taking me 4 fucking weeks(feature was done long time ago, but not in the way that. they wanted, even though I followed existing implementations). I have like 60 comments in my code review from which half feels like it's just purely nitpicking. I already have 2.5 years experience and I just want to kill myself or quit the job if every code review here willl be like this.

> [PM from a totally different project / team comments on already-closed 10-line PR] How about we [add a totally new feature involving several engineer-weeks to patch over a fixable bug in another part of the system] instead?

> [me] we can talk about that, but it's nontrivial and we should scope any work relating to it to be sure we're doing the right thing

> [him] [starts private email chain] this should be simple. Why isn't this as simple as that other change?

> [me] [explains why]

> [him] I think it should be simple. We'll talk about it offline tomorrow and maybe you can do it next week.

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

Just joined a new company and can only describe the merge process as madness.....is it or am I the one that is mad?!

They have the following branches:

UAT#_Development branch
UAT#_Branch (this kicks of a build to a machine named UAT#)

Each developer has a branch with the # being a number 1 to 6 except 5 which has been reserved for UAT_Testing branch.

They are working on a massive monolith (73 projects), it has direct references to projects with no nuget packages. To build the solution requires building other solutions in a particular order, in short a total fucking mess.

Developer workflow:

Branch from master with a feature or hotfix branch

Make commits to said branch and test manually as there are no automated tests

Push the commits to their UAT#_Development branch, this branch isn't recreated each time and may have differences to all the other UAT#_Development branches.

Once happy create a pull request to merge from UAT#_Development to UAT#_Branch you can approve your own pull request, this kicks off a build and pushes it to a server that is named UAT#.

Developer reviews changes on the UAT# server.

QA team create a UAT/year/month/day branch. Then tell developers to merge their UAT#_branch branches in to the previously created branch, this has to be done in order and that is done through a flurry of emails.

Once all merges are in it then gets pushed to a UAT_Testing branch which kicks off a build, again not a single automated test, and is manually tested by the QA team. If happy they create a release branch named Release/year/month/day and push the changes into it.

A pull request from the release branch is then made to pre-live environment where upon merge a build is kicked off. If that passes testing then a pull request to live is created and the code goes out into production.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it's a total mess. I knew when I took on this job it would be a challenge but nothing has prepped me for the scale of the challenge!! My last place it was trunk based development, commit straight to master, build kicks off with automated testing and that just gets pushed through each of the environments, so easy, so simple!

They tell me this all came about because they previously used EntityFramework EDMX models for the database and it caused merge hell.

Today I was revisiting my first ever WPF project made, turns out that a baboon could have written better code than this.

The project literally has messages going everywhere to every viewmodel even if it's not supposed to.

I'll spare the details, but let's just say I'd rather jump in a mountain of needles than try to add a feature in this mess.

So I am now refactoring without my bosses permission since I am the only one in this company able to work with WPF and I still have enough time for a simple refactor.

Already on about 200 errors by just changing a few lines of code because everything inherits everything.

So recently, one of my coworkers had some issues with their configurations on Visual Studio : To test our feature, we have a specific setup that I won't describe here. Thing is, it's not a simple localhost. Remember that.

The issue of the configuration was on that feature : they went back on localhost for no reason and couldn't get it back as before. So the testing was different since some uses cases weren't redo-able on their setup.

So my co-worker had that and nothing had done the trick to fix it, so they just left it like that.
Then another one had the problem. And another one, and another one, etc. And I don't.

So what was the problem ? An update that messes up everything in the setup.

A simple internal update. Glad I didn't updated yet. Now I'm the only one in my team (4 people right now) who still has that feature.

Follow-up rant to my company. Today's day is fairly good, so let's talk about infra.

We're building upon an existing open-source project which is not intended to be extended (e.g. plugins).

Our backend-team somehow hacked symfony into the app, which made the actual work a little bit less annoying. But on the other side, there is absolutely no automation. Everything is setup by hand and I need to upload my sources to my dev-server and watch what files exactly are overwritten. Because if not, I accidentally overwrite core sources which will break the whole app, no matter what. If I forget what file I wrongly overwrote, I have no choice but to setup the core from scratch and apply our sources on-top, AGAIN.

The first time setup took me almost five days.
Oh yeah and the team shares one dev server, so whenever I feel like fucking with a mate, I can easily fuck up his system, since everyone has root-rights.

We're required to use windows, but our dev is linux and I am the only knowledgable linux guy. They need cheatsheets (to be fair, I need my powershell-cheatsheet).

We market the same app with some additional functionality, but we also have clients which require their own stuff. This case has never been thought-out, since for these specific clients, we also modify some core-parts. Which makes it a real hassle to add a basic new feature to that special customer.

At least our frontend is somewhat decent. Simple and without critical thinking, but it works and is decently understandable. I'll rant about that for another day, it's still tedious.

I know I won't stay there for long since I start my own stuff, but it's sad. Nothing is perfect and they _do_ want to make it better, but it's the usual "there is no time, client first" talk. On the other hand, they tell that we should be more efficient, but there is no way to be without looking back at the fundamental structure and what takes us so long.

I don't think I am able to change anything here and as I heard from co-workers, they already look for something new.

cheers

Okay Android dev intern here.
This has been an awfully weird experience for me as an Android dev and this is not the first time. I am seeing a pattern here and i don't know if its just bad luck or its the reality

I have always learned Android by searching on the web , on stack overflow, medium articles, youtube , books , etc.

Sometimes i had a vision to create some unique nd innovative app, nd sometimes i just wanted to learn a particular tech, framework, library, or a feature.

The former case sometimes required the knowledge of unexplored areas, so in order to make the possible product, the original idea would reduce to a smaller, more possible one if i thought it isn't possible or "need more resources on that" after several hours of searching.

But as an intern i found this approach not working out. Here the company gave me an app idea by a designer who thinks its possible, the senior Android dev also thinks its possible and i also believed it to be possible.

The thing is we all know its possible but the person working on it, i.e me, doesn't know have all the knowledge for it.

Fine . I will apply my usual time taking approach of searching and debugging to tackle my issues when they arrive.

But at one stage i too would get exhausted. To me , the code in my front is the correct code for this approach and i have checked all the possible cases, debugged it and yet can't find the issue.

Now the only thing i want is for my senior to look into it, tell me if its an architecture issue or is there any possible case that i missed.

But that's not what company wants. The senior says that he's involved in a lot of projects and my problem is too simple to be solved by solely myself. Now i am sitting here, with my code, exhausted and no longer willing to work here . (And that's maybe why it's my 4th internship and not first)

Am i the asshole fresher?is this always going to be the case? Am i the one running away from the problem and deserve all the lashing that i am getting for not completing the product and getting stuck?

the back-end now has spend 9 months to be able to upload phonebooks .... and it still doesn't work :'D

How... It's not even a complex feature. Just parsing a simple xslx file. I don't know how incompetent a senior developer can be.

What's the minimal feature set that can make a language as ornamented as JS into a comfortable REPL?
Should I write a full parser or should I try to patch my way around with regex?
It will have to interface a lot with JS so it has to be able to manage JS datastructures in some fashion, which means that I can't just make a whole new command line with its own programs.

My current plan:
Some delimiter (probably a semicolon) will take the output of a command and inject it in the next in case you decide halfway through a line to do some more processing, It also awaits promises and does some other nice stuff to make controlling such pipelines easy. I have an elaborate system in mind to decide where a value must be injected to make the line valid so in most cases you don't even have to indicate it. JS has beautifully simple syntax rules so I have a lot of technical balance to burn before I start building technical debt.

I have some ideas for automatic parentheses and commas in function calls. I realize while using a command line you do not want to tap shift often. My main idea here is that two names or values in js are always joined by an operator so the first missing operator is a call and following missing operators are commas until the end of line. This has lots of nasty edge cases though, like that no argument expression can begin with a unary operator or a bracket of any shape. You can always prepend a comma but it's cognitive load.

Anyway, do you have any suggestion or warning besides "js bad" which I know but it's the most popular sandboxable language and has a massive existing set of libraries which I kinda need.