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Search - "just let me edit my code"
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To improve our user's "experience" I suggested to my boss to add a status page showing...well, the current status of our services. Everybody was up for it, so I go off and implement a basic version + automated monitoring backend, get lots of positive feedback, all seems fine.
Then it starts:
Boss: "Can you get it all set up by this Saturday?"
Me: "Uh, today is Wednesday and I've never set up all the stuff needed on a proper server before"
Boss: "Well, you still have a few days. Please also contact your coworker to get it all hooked up in our launcher"
Me: "I'll try, can't make any promises though"
Contact my coworker and tell him what the plan is. I had already given him access to the repo and he is positive to get it all hooked up (I doubt he ever cloned my repo, let alone ran my code)
Spend all Friday getting my stuff set up on the production server, feeling pretty good thanks to the many tutorials.
Contact the boss Friday evening:
Me: "All up and running"
Boss: "Thanks, but we decided to go with a basic HTML page instead. We can just manually edit that, should be enough.
Me: "..."
In the end my stuff was never used, the server I set up was finally taken down a month ago. The gratitude you get when not hacking together some absolute shit that causes problems when you don't add <br/> tags at the correct places to prevent an ugly overflow, cause the coworker was too lazy to implement some form of line wrap in the launcher. I'm not saying my stuff is the best of the best, but at least it was professional looking to a certain extent.8 -
Online tutorial pet peeves
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My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:
1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)
2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)
3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)
4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull
5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video
6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time
7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)
8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed
9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button
10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)14 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
Dev: Hay dude , look this page is broken, how long has it been like this.
Me: No? 🤔, Weren't you working on the Database for this yesterday?
Dev: I didn't change anything yet...
Me: Okay, let's do a git bisect and see where this came from.
...After going back in history and checking out like 3 commits.
Dev: It's fine I'll just search for it
Me: 😕, that's what we are doing the bisect for?
Dev: But we've already looked at so many!?
...After some time of convincing, finds good commit, does the bisect and finds offending piece of code. The database details changed.
Me: okay so while it's still pointing to the old database it's working but switch it to the latest one and it breaks. You sure you didn't change anything?
Dev: I didn't do anything.
Me: okay well it seems to me like it must be a database issue, let me know what you find.
10min later...
Dev: Hay dude, soo I found it, I accidentally renamed a table
In my mind: 😲😲😲
I hate working at a company with bad practices like saving database config into git and not making a copy of the database when you intend to work on it, and not edit the f'ing live instance! Not even close to the luxury of migrations.1 -
my fist job... i get to edit a c++ code written by a (mind you) programming company that they teamed with for the past(mind you again) 3 years ...
now just for starters, this code was edited by self taught coders that are really good engineers(they are really good), that didnt really know how the code worked before yet they still changed it, and it worked, how ever they wanted some changes.
i get the project files, and there is not one single comment describing what is happening... only code commented out... and no documentation what so ever were done....
so below are some of my comments that i wrote after i finished adding what i had to add, and fixing what i had to fix:
/*first rule of C anything coding, no actual functions in the header, well let me introduce you to a fully functioning thread running program all in the header, enjoy*/
//used to control the thread
// i honestly dont know why, but it worked soooooo yea...
// TG uncommented // for absolutely no reason what so ever...
//used to communicate with the port
//the message to be sent to the inverter, which has a code that will handle it
//hmmmmmm...
//again not usefull since we are using radioButtons
// same ...
// same ...
// same ...
// they said they dont even use this mode, but none the less, same ...
// calculate the checksum for the message
// ....
// one of the things that work, and god forbids i touch
// used for the status displayed on screen
// used for the (censored :P) status in the message
// used for the (censored :P) status in the message
// not used at all, but the message structure contains it and i refuse to edit that abomination
// used for the (censored :P) status in the message
// used for the (censored :P) status in the message
// just dont ask and roll with it, i didnt want to touch this
// saaaaame ...
// if before true this saaaaaame ...
// value of the (censored :P)
// it pains me to say it again, but this is no use
// (censored :P) input
// (censored :P) input
// only place seen , like for real it was just defined,sooooo yea :D
// well you know how it is
// message string
// check sum string
/****below from feed back****/
// (censored :P) coming in
// (censored :P) coming in
// (censored :P) coming in
// (censored :P)
/****below is the output to the receiver ****/
//(censored :P)
// (censored :P)
// (censored :P)
// (censored :P)
//you thought we were done.... nope, no idea. it comes in the feedback
// not used, literally commented out the one time it was used
// same ...
// XD, man this is a blast, same ...
// nope ...
// used to store the port chosen for the communication
// is a static for the number of data we have recorded so far, and as a row indicator for the recording method
// used to indicate the page we are on in the excel file, as well as the point in physical point in the test
// same ... oh look at this a positive same :D
// same ...
// same ...6 -
This is how my coworker does code reviews... imagine comment on a line of code:
"Oh why does this not do this and that.
Edit: Oh I've read few lines below, now I understand. But this may break when this and that.
Edit: Nevermind I realized, that never happens, forget about it."
Let me just emphasise, that this is single comment, so it's basically editted multiple times, before submition.
Like wtf, just delete the comment then?!2 -
I have a nightmare project that I will probably be ranting about quite a lot in the coming weeks, but I don't want SEO to pick up the specifics on the off chance my peers Google the issues we're facing and my profile comes up.
Let me set up the scene by describing the predicament, and then I'll get to the most outrageous thing I've heard while working at this job. It gives you a CLEAR idea of why we're in this situation in the first place.
Anyways, the nightmare project only runs in IE with compatibility mode set to version 6. So it only runs in IE 6 at the latest.
And it is massive. I'm talking real, real enormous.
The most recent roadblock I ran into while Chrome-ifying it is the extensive use of a browser API that was removed 8 years ago.
It involves synchronous data input and I know for a relatively certain fact there's no way to fix it without combing through every single reference to this API and converting the ones that need sync data (not all of them do) to callbacks. How big of an issue is that?
Well, just one of that 15-ish modules has over 900 references to it. Even just creating a spreadsheet of "commented out / doesn't need a fix / needs fix" for each reference in 1/15th of this project would take days of manual labor.
Here's the rant.
So after discussing this issue in the meeting (we ended on "they don't believe me that we can't just replace it with jQuery") I brought up the next issue. One of our 3rd party libraries is so old it doesn't work anymore and we can't modify that code (it's compiled).
They said that even if it was backwards compatible (no fucking way. This version is like, at least 10 years old, I guarantee it) they can't simply replace it because we don't have a subscription to this product anymore (suggesting we find an alternative).
And I fucking kid you not, this is what happened next.
They then began discussing how this is why you shouldn't use 3rd party code. Because it becomes obsolete and you can't even fix it yourself because it's not yours to edit.
Yes. They said this DIRECTLY after we discussed our 900+ references to a browser API >>REMOVED<< 8 years ago. Yes, they said this about a 3rd party library that receives regular support but is totally FUCKED because we NEVER updated it after adding it and we never even renewed the LICENSE.
What the FUCK2 -
When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?
Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.
1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")
2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.
3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.
4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.
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That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.
The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.
Here is the question (finally!)
Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*
Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.
If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.
The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.
I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.
Thanks5