Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Started being a Teaching Assistant for Intro to Programming at the uni I study at a while ago and, although it's not entirely my piece of cake, here are some "highlights":

* students were asked to use functions, so someone was ingenious (laughed my ass off for this one):
def all_lines(input):
all_lines =input
return all_lines

* "you need to use functions" part 2
*moves the whole code from main to a function*

* for Math-related coding assignments, someone was always reading the input as a string and parsing it, instead of reading it as numbers, and was incredibly surprised that he can do the latter "I always thought you can't read numbers! Technology has gone so far!"

* for an assignment requiring a class with 3 private variables, someone actually declared each variable needed as a vector and was handling all these 3 vectors as 3D matrices

* because the lecturer specified that the length of the program does not matter, as long as it does its job and is well-written, someone wrote a 100-lines program on one single line

* someone was spamming me with emails to tell me that the grade I gave them was unfair (on the reason that it was directly crashing when run), because it was running on their machine (they included pictures), but was not running on mine, because "my Python version was expired". They sent at least 20 emails in less than 2h

* "But if it works, why do I still have to make it look better and more understandable?"

* "can't we assume the input is always going to be correct? Who'd want to type in garbage?"

* *writes 10 if-statements that could be basically replaced by one for-loop*
"okay, here, you can use a for-loop"
*writes the for loop, includes all the if-statements from before, one for each of the 10 values the for-loop variable gets*

* this picture

N.B.: depending on how many others I remember, I may include them in the comments afterwards

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I was mad with thought working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI that were being built at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision in Computer Programming at all.

Manager: I read an article today

Dev: oh here we go….

Manager: We must pivot to only functional programming, which means only using functions instead of classes

Dev: Actually functional programming is a bit more nuanced tha—

Manager: Any use of classes going forward is not allowed. Everything must use functions! Classes are an outdated way of programming, using classes is why we continue to miss our deadlines. Functional programming is lean, classes are waterfall.

Dev: What about the libraries we use? Many of those use classes

Manager: Wrap them in a function then, that way they are pure which is one of the requirements of functional programming. You would know that if you spent as much personal time as I do keeping up with the times.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

aslkfjasf. i've spent 12 hours today (and lots more over the past two days) trying to reproduce a bug that my [sort of] coworker insists is present. I haven't seen any proof of it anywhere, let alone steps to reproduce it.

I've poured through the code, following all of its tangled noodles of madness from start to fuck-this-shit. I've read and reread the pile of demon excrement so many times i can still read the code when i close my eyes. so. not. kidding.

anyway, the coworker person is getting mad because i haven't fixed the bug after days, and haven't even reproduced it yet. This feature is already taking way too fucking long so I totally don't blame him. but urghh it's like trying to unwind a string someone tied into a tight little ball of knots because they were bored.

but i just figured out why I haven't been able to reproduce it.

the stupid fucking unreliable dipshit ex-"i'm a rockstar and my code rocks"-CTO buffoon (aka API Guy, aka the `a=b if a!=b`loody pointless waste of mixed spaces and tabs) that wrote the original APIs ... 'kay, i need to stop for breath.

The dumbfuck wrote the APIs (which I based the new ones on mostly wholesale because wtf messy?), but he never implemented a very fucking important feature for a specific merchant type. It works for literally every type except the (soon-to-be) most common one. and it just so happens that i need that very specific feature to reproduce this bug.

Why is that one specific merchant type handled so differently? No fucking idea.

But exactly how they're handled differently is why I'm so fking pissed off. It's his error checking. (Some) of his functions return different object types (hash, database object, string, nullable bool, ...) depending on what happened. like, when creating a new gift, it (eventually...) either returns a new Gift object or a string error basically saying "ahhh everything's broken again!" -- which is never displayed, compared against, or recorded anywhere, ofc. Here, the API expects a Hash. That particular function call *always* returns a Hash, no matter what happens in the myriad, twisting, and interwoven branches the code could take. So the check is completely pointless.

EXCEPT. if an object associated with another object associated with the passed object (yep) has a type of 8. in which case, one of the methods in the chain returns a PrintQueue that gets passed back up the call stack. implicitly, and nested three levels in. ofc.

And if the API doesn't get its precious Hash, it exclaims that the merchant itself is broken, and tells the user to contact support. despite, you know, the PrintQueue showing that everything worked perfectly. In fact, that merchant's printer will be happily printing away in the background.

All because type checking is this guy's preferred method of detecting errors. (Raise? what's that? OOP? Nah, let's do diverging splintered-monolithic with some Ruby objects thrown in.)

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

Anyway. the summary of this long-winded, exhaustion-fueled tirade is that our second-most-loved feature doesn't work on our second-most-common merchant type.

and ofc that was the type of merchant i've been testing on. for days. while having both a [semi] coworker and my boss growing increasingly angry at me for my lack of progress.

It's also a huge feature, and the boss doesn't understand that. (can't or won't, idk)

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

I HATE working with MS Office products. Yes, Access, I'm looking at you, you backwards, whanabe database reject! You're invalid as a serious SQL database and retarded as an data application suite.

VBA, make up your MIND with your damn function calls! Either require me to use parenthesis or don't! I'm sick of this conditional parenthesis sh*t!

While we're talking about not making up your mind... screw 'sub', you half wit language! Either use functions like a real language or go the f&$k home and make room for a language that knows what it's doing!

Oh!!! WHY... WHY! do you have null AND... NOTHING?! Who... Who... WHO invented "nothing"?! And what sick joke are you playing at with isnull() and empty()??? How many damn ways so you need to test for "no value"?!?!

Access... That's right, I'm not done with you yet... How is it you've survived this damn long in the business world with all of the databases you corrupt? Sure, you suck as a real database, but at least have some freaking pride that people even USE you! How DARE your corrupt yourself with the regularity you seem to have! I wish my bowel movements were as regular as your database corruptions, for the love of humanity.

F$@k you, VBA! F@&k you, Access! F$#k you, MS Office! And Fuuuuuu$k YOU Microsoft for shoving these half assed reject tools down my throat!

I hope your cloud uses Access as a back end and gets some injection virus.

*Takes deep breath* need to say that.

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

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

dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

First time ranter here..

So I started to work in this big company with allegedly many talented devs.

All excited to start and learn a whole bunch of new stuff.

There was this dev, with gazillion years of experience.

We were working on a similar parts of the code base and he told me I should be reusing his module.

I opened the module sources to learn about its internals.

Oh boy...

To illustrate it best, Let’s say there was a function called foo.
It was doing one thing. There was also a function called foo1. Doing almost exactly the same thing. There was also fooA.
And I kid you not, there was a fooA1.
All of them were doing almost the same thing.

Almost all of the functions were documented. The documentation for foo would be:
“This does X. I don’t like how it does it, so there is foo1 which is better.”

Additionally, only 1 of the functions was in use...

It doesn’t end here.
There were functions named like:
cdacictad

You ask what it means?
Well it means “clean directory a copy it’s contents to another directory” of course...

Months later he is no longer with us. I deleted this module.

PS
Glad to be here ;)

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I really couldn't stop thinking about my program and working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI progrmas that were being made at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision to enter into Computer Science at all.

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

My tech stack progression:

Started with PHP without any frameworks, using a homegrown MVC architecture. Used to use `mysql_` functions everywhere. And only jquery + vanilla CSS in the front end.

Then moved to use PDO functions in PHP and Backbone.js + Less CSS in the front-end.

Then moved to Django in the back-end. Did not like Django very much as it is too opinionated and not flexible (although it's damn good for rapid development if you buy into their type of things).

Then moved to Flask + SQLAlchemy and using a home grown architecture. This is a sweet spot for me in terms of back end and stayed in this spot for the longest time.

Moved to Postgres from MySQL as I fell in love with Postgres.

Then learnt React+Redux. Liked it. Made most sense to front-end development this way. Moved front-end stack to React+Redux.

Learning Haskell and been working with Scotty and eyeing Servant for a while now.

Let's see where it goes from here.

PS: this is my personal journey through various tech stacks in various products at various companies I have worked. I'm not talking about moving a product through these many tech stacks. That doesn't make any sense.

First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.

Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.

Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.

I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)

I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.

So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.

I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Am I the only one who, when working with dynamically typed languages, never uses dynamic features? Like, I never change a variable type, and make sure functions will only return one data type?
I just think dynamic types leads to so many bugs

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

JavaScript Motherfucking Asynchronous Bullshit.

I get it, for quite some stuff, async is very, very useful. But why on fucking earth do so goddamn many functions NEED this (and those callback functions) and can't do without?!

If there would be good and nicely understandable await documentation that actually fucking works, I'd be so happy.

I've currently got .then after .then after motherfucking then and its irritating me to no end as it, in this context, shouldn't even be necessary. This thing I'm writing doesn't give a fuck if something takes a few milliseconds before the rest of the program can continue!!

Fuck asynchronous programming in JavaScript for goddamn everything.

(I do love JavaScript!)

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

Everyone talks about their hate of js but like python is honestly just as bad.

- shitty package manager,
* need to recreate python environments to keep workflows seperate as oppose to just mapping dependencies like in maven, npm, cargo, go-get
* Can't fix python version number to project I.e specify it in requirements
- dynamic typing that gets fixed with shitty duck typing too many times
- no first class functions
- limited lambda expressions
- def def def
- overly archaic error messages, rarely have I gotten a good error message and didn't have to dive into package code to figure it out
- people still use 2.7 ... Honestly I blame the difficulty of changing versions for this. It's just not trivial to even specify another python version
- inconsistent import system. When in module use . When outside don't.
- SLOW so SLOW
- BLOCKING making things concurrent has only recently got easier, but it still needs lots of work. Like it would be nice to do

runasync some_async_fcn()
Or just running asynchronous functions on the global scope will make it know to go to some default runtime. Or heck. Just let me run it like that...

- private methods aren't really private. They just hide them in intelisense but you can still override them....

I know my username is ironic :P

The new mobile app codebase i'm working with, was clearly written by someone who just read a book on generics and encapsulation.

I need to pull out 2 screens into a separate library to have it shared around. The 1 networking request used is wrapped up in a 'WebServiceFactory' and `WebServiceObjectMapper`, used by a `NetworkingManager` which exposes a generic `request` method taking in a `TopLevelResponse` type (Which has imported every model) which uses a factory method to get the real response type.

This is needed by the `Router` which takes a generic `Action` which they've subclassed for each and every use case needing server communication.

Then the networking request function is part of a chain of 4 near identical functions spread across 4 different files, each one doing a tiny bit more than the last and casting everything to a new god damn protocol, because fuck concrete types.

Its not even used in that many places, theres like 6 networking calls. Why are people so god damn fucking stupid and insist on over engineering the shit out of their apps. I'm fed the fuck up with these useless skidmarks.

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!!

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

Many of you who have a Windows computer may be familiar with robocopy, xcopy, or move.
These functions? Programs? Whatever they may be, were interesting to me because they were the first things that got me really into batch scripting in the first place.

What was really interesting to me was how I could run multiples of these scripts at a time.

<storytime>
It was warm Spring day in the year of 2007, and my Science teacher at the time needed a way to get files from the school computer to the hard-drive faster. The amount of time that the computer was suggesting was 2 hours. Far too long for her. I told her I’d build her something that could work faster than that. And so started the program would take up more of my time than the AI I had created back in 2009.
</storytime>

This program would scan the entirety of the computer's file system, and create an xcopy batch file for each of these directories. After parsing these files, it would then run all the batch files at once. Multithreading as it were? Looking back on it, the throughput probably wasn't any better than the default copying program windows already had, but the amount of time that it took was less. Instead of 2 hours to finish the task it took 45 minutes. My thought for justifying this program was that; instead of giving one man to do paperwork split the paperwork among many men. So, while a large file is being copied, many smaller files could be copied during that time.

After that day I really couldn't keep my hands off this program. As my knowledge of programming increased, so did my likelihood of editing a piece of the code in this program.

The surmountable amount of updates that this program has gone through is amazing. At version 6.25 it now sits as a standalone batch file. It used to consist of 6 files and however many xcopy batch files that it created for the file migration, now it's just 1 file and dirt simple to run, (well front-end, anyways, the back-end is a masterpiece of weirdness, honestly) it automates adding all the necessary directories and files. Oh, and the name is Latin for Imitate, figured it's a reasonable name for a copying program.

I was 14, so my creativity lacked in the naming department >_<

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

PHP arrays.

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

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

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

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

Bonus PHP trivia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

JavaScript.

So terrible language in so many ways, the code is a absolute mess, the shit of the callback hell of functions inside functions inside functions.

And now everything it's built around the tucking JavaScript, you have to learn it by force because there is almost no project that doesn't use it.

I know it has some benefits and because that is getting bigger but the syntax is the worst shit ever, I mean, switching from Python to JavaScript is a pain.

The only good thing is it's getting better with each ES iteration, but it is still a really big piece of crap with hundreds of frameworks.

Only if people understood the amount of effort that goes behind building a simple app.
Even if it's a simple notes app, I've to design the UI (at least 2 different activities - 1 for the list and the other for editing notes), write the code which makes it run i.e. without which the app is just a piece of empty design, think about what data
structures to use (that notes you are saving need to be stored somehow) and then club everything together and hope nothing breaks (spoiler alert: something will definitely break).

People need to understand that it's not just putting some fancy buttons and boxes around. Also, I'm not just making the app for one device. I've to make sure it works on different screen sizes, different versions of the OS (a user can't imagine how many functions need to be re written because something got deprecated in the process and I'd to switch to something different).

Also I'm not just sitting at my computer and converting coffee to code. I've to think about the flow, structure, design, navigation, backend etc. Of the app; most of my time isn't spent writing code but thinking/studying how to write the code. I also need to wait while the project is compiling/building every time I want to test it.
A function which you think is hard to implement night be really easy while something you claim is easy might be a nightmare. Oh and I didn't even mention how I need to stick to some design guidelines to make the app look consistent with the rest of the OS.
If you're wondering why a developer is spending most of his time on a browser, he isn't playing internet games or browsing reddit ( at least you better hope not), he's probably looking at the docs/stack overflow to get something to work/fix something!

Wow! That was long. Thanks!

Oh god, I was like 13 and just found out about RPG Maker 2000. I got a pirated copy from a friend because ive got no internet at that time. I remember, my first project was with a friend of mine and dayum, we were so dumb and unknowing.

Once we wanted to implement a counter of how many fights a player had.
The problem was, we only knew about switches (boolean variables) and so we started to implement boolean variables like these:

hadOneFight
hadTwoFights
hadThreeFight
and so on, as something like a counter.
We took this to 50 before I asked my friend if this is the right way of doing this.

He answered: "thats probably the reason, why games are so big nowadays" (he just installed morrowind at home...)

Then at one day, I reached the point I didnt knew what I should do next in this project, so I looked around at all the other functions we never even tried and I found something called "variables".
Those where the "real" variables like string and int and wow, suddenly the possibilities where endless. I told him about variables at telephone and what we could do now, but that just got him somehow frustrated so he told me, that he wants to leave this programming thing

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

Spent the last month creating a really scalable chat application, with fast front end, all kinds of neat functions such as polls, and a really efficient database structure in Apache Cassandra.. Everything is built to use NoSQL, and even the front-end is using all kinds of features to speed up itself... Now, guess what... The company I'm doing an internship decided that everything needs to be done in MariaDB, and I can basically remove 1/3 of my program, event the front end will get a huge purge of code, and as much as I explained that MariaDB IS NOT FUCKING USABLE FOR A CHAT APPLICATION, and when there are many messages, the access times will get realllllyyy sloow, and that the whole structure there currently is based on NoSQL... Now I can remove all the clustering, custom data types, and bucketing of messages... And store FUCKING JSON IN 'TEXT' FIELDS IN A STUPID SQL DATABASE. FUCK ME

What fascinates me the most about the industry we work in, is the disruptive and transformative nature of ideas the come out every day.

The technology we use augmented with the software we build have the capability to disrupt and shift the existing paradigm of absolutely any industry today. The solution we construct changes the way in which an industry functions, and brings the horizon closer while making the ocean wider.

So does our capability to design and transform the existing landscape with the ability to visualise the many dimensions of a problem that are otherwise overlooked by others.

I had one of the best feelings today when 3 extremely prolific doctors in the Indian opthalmological industry told me how the solution i built could change the way in which they have been working for almost 20 years ... For the best ...

It's just such a great feeling to know every line of code we write , execute and debug would one day disrupt and transform an otherwise traditional landscape.

So hooray to us and the things we invent, because at the end of the day a PC to code and internet for the outreach ( and stackoverflow ofcourse. 😅 ) Is all that's needed to bring about a metamorphosis of conventional thoughts and theories.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

My coworker claimed to have experience with R programming on their resume.

Now I don't know R myself but I'm pretty sure what actually happened was they were handed an R program and told how to run it...

Cause they doesn't use functions without being told to, I've had to explain global vs local variables multiple fucking time, and the worst fucking offense in my opinion

THEY DOESN"T READ FUCKING ERROR MESSAGES, so many times there's been an issue in the scripts and when I go to look at what's wrong it's 3 fucking lines down from what they fucking screenshot and spam me on teams with

!rant
Warning : This rant is long and is a rant asking for help and suggestions. If you will read and dont leave any comments, please go search other rants. Thanks.
-----------------------------------
Hi, fellow ranters. In our community, we have a tech class where teens (teens here mean 14yo -15yo) come to learn computer stuffs. Teens here are selected by a test and an interview. There are some teens who are f***ing awesome. One of them are proficient in scratch. (yeah, the orange cat) Another is awesome at PhotoShop, and the other loves windows xp. The teacher uses Microsoft Visual C++ IDE made in the 1990s. The kid sitting to my left made flappy bird with gamemaker. About 10 to 11 teens doesnt know what ctrl+alt+del does in windows and never did programming before... 3 among them always brings coke and oreos and eats super loudly. CRACK! And I bet no one knows about git.
Ok. Enough for the awesome teens. Now what we learn.
We learn C! Yes, C. We learned for, if else, switch and all those stuffs, then learned variables, which made other students who never did programming before be (―,.―).
Next class we will learn about functions in 3 hours. Then array and pointer in 3 hours. Thats it for c programming. Then we do some unnecessary stuffs and time for the finals.
We need to make a project with up to 4 teens as one team. Now I am asking you awesome ranters to suggest some projects for about 4 pros and 16 noobs can do. 10 hours are given in class and we can do in other times by ourselves in home. What should we do? I bet many of them will say to make ascii art in c which is dull and I have no thoughts of doing that.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
To see my skills, go to my profile page.
| Comments below
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Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

I had the oppertunity to join a non profit organization to help them automate stuff instead of serving the army. One of their core applications got rewritten like a year ago from a terrible and very old Symfony stack to Laravel / React.

The guys who were in charge for the rewrite didn't really adapt the mindset of either MVC for Laravel nor the component idea behind React. There are a few controllers in the backend, but they sometimes have functions defined which would clearly belong in a model or service class. They rarely defined relationships on models, instead they're joining the tables together for the same effect. The frontend rendering mostly happens in for loops over the returned array from the API instead of breaking things down into little components. This ends in components which have sometimes over 1000 lines with super-nested logic in it.

But I did find my favorite piece of code today in of the controllers. Some many questions ...

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

Recently, I had to make a minor modification to some Node.js code a coworker wrote a year ago which buffers stringified JSON into Kinesis. I just needed to add a new key to the input object, it took minutes to make the change, but hours to make sense out the absolute trash spaghetti code this guy wrote. After spending half a day trying to make his code readable, I just got so pissed off. I replaced his 15 files/+1,500 lines of uncommented code, filled with classes, factory functions, poorly named functions and vars, and so, so many spelling mistakes.

We now have a single, well commented, 300 line file that does the same thing.

Get that shit code out of here.

Python devs and data analysts....

Do you recommend using pycharm for working with jupyter notebooks? I surely had a bad time with it.

I have been using many jetbrains softwares , and am a fan of their docs search and autocompletion. But I don't think there is a full support for jupyter jn it, because sometimes my graphs made using matploit or seaborn just brakes.

And some libraries have a lot of functions taking parameters as " *args, **kwargs " , I don't know what that means but those function take a lot of "value" parameters i guess?(like this: plt.figure(figsize=[13,6], axis=False) )
Pycharm also don't seem to have access to list of those arguments...

Are you having such problems too? Have you found some better ide with autocompletions and support for jupyter? Do tell.

(Ps: i know jupyter can be run directly on a browser, but as i said "auto completions and documentations" )

I am usually lurking in here since I never really worked as a Software Developer, but until I start going to the University, I thought I might also find myself a job in Software Development.

Well... I don't know where to start.

Someone in here heard of JBoss? Me neither... we're using it... It is a Framework to deploy fortified Java Web Applications. My first day was very chaotic and was dedicated to get this fucking shit to work. I got JBoss 7.5 from my colleagues and started deploying the hello world program...

So. Many. Things. Gone. Wrong...

After like 5 hours of troubleshooting, I had to install/setup a new wrapper with my own batch scripts, install SPECIFICALLY jdk 1.7_17 (anything else won't work) and downgrade JBoss to 7.2.

Yeah that's the first thing. Let's continue about JBoss. Version 7.2 uh? What's the newest one though? Oh it's now known as WildFly... huh... FUCKING HELL, THE NEWEST ONE IS VERSION 10.1??? AND EVEN 10.1 IS 1 YEAR OLD? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKK AAAAAAHH...

So yeah, after that, without any expectation, I had a look at our codebase. Unit tests huh? I couldn't find a single self written one to test the applications functions... I asked my fellow devs and they told me that "it is too time consuming and we have to focus on new features, the QM Team will just manually test the application". Ever heard this bullshit? A big fat ass codebase with shittons of customers and not a single unit test...

So last but not least, since it is a web application, it also got a site. Y'know RichFaces? The deprecated front end library for Java Webpages? Where you got like 150 Tables per page everyone with a random id everytime you reload? Yeah I don't think I have to explain that to you guys...

So now YOU tell me? Is this a place to be 😂😂😂

Android development is unnecessarily complex. To the core. Rant #371651681324

Only being few months in to android development, I can say that using too many functions and classes for doing something silly is very illogical. I mean -
Livedata, think about it, if some data is shown on the UI, it must mean the UI be updated instantly on data change, but the concept of Livedata was introduced only few years back.Which again, needs an observer and we actually have to ask it to observe changes.

Android development is a mess. More and more updates to the architecture and code is to cover up the problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place. A simple Spinner with custom object will require more time in stackoverflow rather than actual coding. Very counter-intuitive, inefficient, time-consuming and exhaustive.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.

During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.

Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!

FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!

Fucking managers
Now I know why companies with shitty managers don’t grow

Me conversing with my senior as to how to make one of our functions scalable which around 10k devs would be using.

Manager walks in

Manager: how’s function x going

Me: great , will be done soon

Manager: you need to finish it by today

Me: can’t do it , too many sub functions need to be reconfigured( which was his job)

Manager: take *insert some managers asslicker’s name*’s help

Me: okay

We will finish it by today , but everybody know how “robust” the output will be

P.S. I didn’t argue because I’ve done that before and it’s like hitting your head on a wall. If you have read my previous rants, you would know

So I was reading a comment where someone said that Windows is sure as hell not polished, just 'psychologically pleasing.' I get that, and I've tried to main with Mint Cinnamon/KDE for a while, and I've tried so many distro, but I have too many issues with Linux to make it a true daily workstation and personal os.

For example, Windows apps typically have installers, graphical ones, which allow you to choose an install location and stuff. Does apt or yum do that? Not unless you use some crazy parametets or some shit.

Okay, fine, what if you DON'T CARE about everything being open source and you just want your 3-monitor Nvidia setup to work without vsync issues? Also a PITA, need to do either cmdline driver install and co fig or some other complicated shit.

I may be considered a power user, but damn if Linux isn't friendly to windows users. Don't get me wrong, I don't like windows, but so far it's the best option for me versus aillion Linux issues. Get me something that functions like Windows on multiple levels (Aesthetic not completely required, but core functionality of programs is.) and only then can I attempt a full migration.

Please fucking tell me there's a better cleaner way to write this render() function?

The use of so many "in-line" code evaluations, arrow functions, (), {}, ...

Just spent like probably 30 minutes just trying to figure out what closes what...

And the author is inconsistent?

Sometimes he uses map( location => { return ... })

other times he uses setState((prevState) => ({ key: this.state.keyValue}))

And there's no note as to why... are they interchangeable, used in specific cases, does it matter????!!!!!!

Or is he just trying to demonstrate 1000 different ways you can say the same thing in JS?

!@#!#@!$#%#$!@#!@#!#$$%

How many recursive functions have you wrote at work?

If you think you found a solution, think twice.
If the implementation is taking too long (too many changes in different functions and classes to fix a single bug) there may be a better solution, it's never too late to reverse the changes and start again, it's not a shame, in the worst case you will reimplement the same solution, but better, in the best you'll find an easier and better one.

Don't run, even if there's a deadline.
It's much worse having to deal with negative feedbacks later.

Tell me what you want but ChatGPT is the best dev companion ever.

I've just submitted 700 lines of JS code with various complex functions because I had an issue for some specific cases I couldn't identify.
In less that a second ChatGPT noticed a missed argument in one of the many function calls... mind blowing.

It's something I would otherwise notice after hours of debugging, looking for a needle in huge functions.

"I don't think we should be playing with our privates {variables} like that" - framework designer

= context =
It was noticed that we have too many setter functions to change private variables just to do unit tests. So we had a small meeting to discuss what to do about this.
Options:
- don't do the test
- ignore till another time (ie: keep the functions till its a problem)
- put the variables into a provider
- use reflection (the above quote was a reaction to this option)

Project manager: "What is a micro service? I'm dating a girl and she mentioned it and I want to impress her."

Me: "Well, you have monolithic services which tend to serve many different functions whereas a micro service tends to serve a single function or a few related functions. They are usually easier to scale and can be optimized to be faster. Still, right tool for the job."

Project manager: "Oh nice! So I can ask her 'Hey, want to see my micro service? It's quick and scalable.'"

-face palm-

He's leaving this week. I'm going to miss him though.

Seriously though, in that context, would scalability mean you're bringing friends?

!rant && POLL

A lot of people are asking for poll feature. There have been many debates. While reading those, I even thought we should probably ask a debate feature before poll.

Anyway you can actually create poll rant. Just gotta be creative and a bit organized like adults (hope we all are).

1) you ask your poll question as rant
2) you enter your poll choices as comments
3) people ++ their favorite choice comment (s)

Of course this is not a poll-poll feature so there are many lacking functions. But at least it works to certain extent.

Eg Question : What is your OS?

When the code has many functions, that have more functions, that call functions within functions

Me: trying to do any simple fucking project
Me: cant figure out how to do something simple or cant figure out how to start or how something should work.
Me *Looks up problem* (everytime...)
results: SOMETHING I WOULD NEVER HAVE FUCKING THOUGHT OF.

Am I just a shitty programmer, a shitty learner, or just not cut out for this? because I fucking Love this field. this is the only thing I ever want to do. BUT I CANT FIGURE ANYTHING OUT FOR THE LIFE OF ME EVEN WITH LANGUAGES IM GOOD AT!! WHICH IS JUST PYTHON AND IM STILL SHIT AT THAT.

I TRY TO DO PROJECTS WITH JS, OR C, OR PYTHON PICK WHICHEVER ONE. AND I NEVER KNOW HOW I SHOULD START IT, AND IF I LOOK UP HOW TO DO IT ITS SO MUCH LONGER AND COOLER AND BETTER THAN MY DUMBASS WOULD HAVE DONE (and longer in a good way because its well thought out and works)

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET A REAL JOB IN THE FIELD IF I CANT MAKE THE RANDOM IDEAS THAT I SEE ON THE INTERNET AND WHY CANT I MAKE THEM AS GREAT OR LONG AND SHIT ON MY OWN. SO MANY PEOPLE CAN WRITE SO MANY LINES OF CODE AND FUNCTIONS AND ALL THIS SHIT THAT WORKS AND YEAH THEY LOOK UP SOME PROBLEMS BUT NOT HOW TO FUCKING DO THE ENTIRE THING LIKE SOME FUCKING RETARD
AWDJKBAKWJBDAOLK;JWDBOALBJKWODANLWIO;NIAWDN;PIAWLDJBAWIDHB
I CANT GO A PROJECT WITHOUT LOOKING UP HOW TO DO ANYTHING BECAUSE MY LITTLE BRAIN CANT FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT

I know recursion is everywhere but I recently noticed it in very unusual place('unusual' in the way we see), I hail from India, we studied in our childhood about road less taken, the way I see, everyone has to take so important decisions in yheir life, one such decission is about career, in India road less taken in career paths is everything other than orthodox education, I too the dreaded road "Education", next decission is to choose stream and there the road less taken is anything other that "Engineering (or medicne) " and I took (*as expected) engineering, after taking computers (which is the dreaded road now) next decision is what next? Dreaded road is job, but this time I chose take a road little less traveled in CS. Then I next decission was to choose the research stream the road less taken here (NOW) is systems as AI is in its prime and everyone whants to ride the wave, but I chose Systems in research, after all these my point how how boolean function is called recursively (in the sense of construct) and as a systems programmer I realize the importance of optimizing how I answer these functions quick and accurate. This is one such boolean function but I am sure you can find many in our path till here so It is better to realize what these functions are optimize then as a good Programmer of your own Life.

whenever I think I am almost done with coding something, and go like "yeah, I can totally finish this the next day within just a few hours. Just add 1-2 functions and done" - it ends up being the opposite. I either realize how many things I didn't think and implement through and end up adding lots of things or I come up with a different approach to things which seems better and have to rework half my stuff...
I guess this will get fixed with experience.
Until then, I guess I'll keep trolling myself.

How can a big company as Facebook, allow that many functions of its website are just untested?

I make you an example, access the mobile version of Facebook from browser, go to a group and change the notifies settings, then refresh the page. The settings returns as before! If I did something like this I'd get fired in less than 0.1 seconds

Today I think it became apparent why we have so many data and prod issues...

No one understands SOLID design principals... Particularly Separation of Concern. No wonder all the Spring (DI) modules look like a mess of God functions that are impossible to reuse and difficult to extend...

Ok a quick, short story time.
Might write longer one later.

Few months ago i asked my professor if i could do something to skip all those labs and lectures from "introduction to programming". He agreed, but i have to take tests as well and make a program showing that i can use all of C/C++ functions, syntax required by the subject. After few months I didnt managed to do ANY significant progress. That happens when i dont have any directions, i just get 10 000 000 ideas and 0 motivation to implement them (with that many ideas my mind becomes tangled as well). I can bet that im not the only guy who has a similar issue, but keep in mind my mental situation isnt that great; more about that in the next rant.

Client Agency: "Well why did it take you so long to style the clickdummy?"

Me: "well I did not anticipate that you had that set up by a student who does it know his css. I had to fix many usability problems first."

Client: "To me it looks just like before. What did you do exactly?"

Me: "Are you serious? That thing was not at all usable before."

Client: "The functions were all there in the first place!"

Me: "Yes, but I one does not know where to click, that is no use, is it?"

Client: "Ok then what ever...I somehow feel like like you have gotten less efficient these days. "

Me: -.-""""!!!!

Client: "so would you please include some effects and make it shiny? I just wanted you to make it shiny."

Me: -___- "ok then"

-----

Client: "Now it's awesome, thanks."

Engineering manager and I have a chat last Friday about some working performant code that needs to be refactored for future reusability. Not my favorite stuff but ok, let’s do it. We talk about things VERBALLY, one way of doing it, then another way. She’s in a rush to her next meeting and has to go. I feel very clear on what she wants and how it needs to happen.

After the call I do some thinking and I give her the estimate and brief her my plan. I tell her exactly the way it’s going to be done. She says do it and gives me her sign off.

I submit my MR today. And then she says why I didn’t do it another way. A more generalized way. And “the way we talked about.”

And I ask her if she can explain her way bc there is obviously some misunderstanding. And she proceeds to zero in on some functions I wrote and say how they are not generalized enough and how it’s basically the same as what we had before (but it’s actually a much different design). I patiently listen and at some point she abruptly says she’s out of time and needs to go to a meeting. I say I still don’t understand what she wants. Then she says that she will implement it bc I still don’t understand and she has no more time to explain. I feel pretty bad.

I suggest next time she can show me on zoom whiteboard, just anything visual and not auditory to make sure things are clear and we are on the same page.

She concludes that management has directed us to come to the office more so I need to come in so we can do in person white-boarding.

This whole thing feels unnecessary. We’ve never had this issue before. It seems like either some intentional plot to get me to come into the office more often or terrible communication skills and a lack of priority on my managers part. Like can you just white board your ideas for 5 minutes?!?! There are many tools to do this digitally!

The thing is I still don’t know where the communication gap is bc I still don’t know what she wants. Keep in mind all this fuss is over three cards of text on a webpage.

This is my first job in industry. How do managers normally communicate engineering ideas? And what are the best ways over zoom? And in person?

I noticed here there is not a culture of whiteboarding or pair programming.

It’s on the days like these I question what I’m doing here…

So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.

For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.

Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.

Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".

Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.

That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.

And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.

The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.

Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.

The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.

Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used.

Microsoft is always at it.

Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.

So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.

Windows 10 users, do this:

Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....

How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?

I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.

Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?

But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)

So needless to say she needs help. All the time.

So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.

I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.

Wanna know why?

Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:

- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer

Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe

And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.

So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!

So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.

I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.

I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!

However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

I saw one of my coworkers do a multi step bus ticket purchase in one file (we use angular 4) instead of using components he just hide and show the sections, resulting in a class that have about 2000 lines of code, unused variables, unused functions o just functions that console.log something, and many many lines of declaring variables. I tried to fix that, but this crazy deadlines were fucking with me

How many of you feel functions API in Java8 should have support wiring up a Function and a Consumer :/

I: I see, this web contain user functions, like registrations, product adding, details editing and many other stuff. Can i ask one question?
Client: Sure.
I: Why designer did not designed those elements?
Client: You can do it better directly from the code.

Should i be mad or delighted? I have no idea.

Writing simple driver for AT24C256 eeprom on pico (RP2040)

It turned out it was FT24C256A, which should follow same protocol.

After literally over month of coming back to it, getting stuck again, rewriting things (including some functions of pico-sdk), i almost gave up a d started just yolo trying random shit.

Afterall the documentation on addressing the chip fucking missled me -_- (1st bit is r/w flag and 2-7 bits are address, counted from MSB->LSB)

I made it work yesterday.

In meantime Ive rewritten Wire library, Ive modified someone's else rewrite, extended sdk to allow getting i2c registers, tried to use tiny go just to learn it doesnt support i2c slave mode, resoldered entire thing few times, measured connections few too many times etc.

Frustrated I doubted I will ever manage to finish putting this project together because it looked like Im just too noob.

I'm working on a very-customized web player at work.
I filled my code with a plenty of comments, many to justify those functions / fixes.

For those comments, Safari is depicted as worse than Edge.
Is it even possible?

The next dev, which will take my code in his hands, must know how much we suffered to build it.

More from my big black book of ai and neuroscience:

I think if trace theory is true to any degree it would go some distance in explaining phenomenal consciousness, assuming I haven't misunderstood anything.

In fuzzy trace theory (FTT) it is posited that people form two types of mental representations about a past event:

*verbatim traces: detailed representations of a past event.

*gist traces: fuzzy representations of a past event.

People can reason with verbatim *and* gist traces but prefer gists.

*vision was suggested to work similarly in 1999. With human vision, two processes could be used: one that aggregates local receptive fields and one that parses the local receptive spatial field. It was suggested that people used prior experience, gists, to decide which dominates a perceptual decision.

Gist processes form representations of events, semantic details, where verbatim reinstates the context found in the surface details of an event.

__notes__

Parallel storage: asserts encoding/storage of verbatim/gist traces operate in *parallel*, not in serial.

I like to think of verbatim traces as databases, and gists as queries constructed by recognition.

Several studies have found that the meaning (gist) of an item is encoded even *before* the surface details (verbatim).

This might be important as a survival mechanism but should not be taken to mean strictly that gists are formed wholly *without* details or important and recognizable features of the item in question. It may well be for high level el processing and classification efficiency this may be an important reprocessing step, in the same way that many functions of the brain are duplicated throughout.

Our computer science GCSE exams are so flawed in so many ways. They're awfully vague or just completely wrong. In the last exam I did, I got a question that was basically:

"There is a server in a network. Name 3 of its functions"

If you did not provide an answer within the 5 "correct answers", it was considered incorrect as it was beyond the curriculum hence irrelevant.

That's like penalising people for not correctly guessing the contents of an opaque box...

I've genuinely lost more marks to the flaws in the marking scheme than genuine error.

Valve, pls fix

I used to fucking love VSCode it visually was great, it was simple, had an integrated terminal that wasn't shit, supported many languages well (while not forcing every extension down your throat), and was straightforward to configure. I also had problems with it, mainly I felt it was way too bloated for an editor.

That good impression I had is gone now. It seems like every time I'm actually using the editor I have to fight with it. Whether that's an update that fucked up my config, or a reinstall and now I have to **convince** my fucking editor to use tabs instead of spaces automatically and I have to specify because holy shit it will not just listen after I set every possible fucking indentation setting to disable spaces or enable/prefer tabs and they keep adding shit like this that I give no shits about that make me sift through the damn settings finding the settings that turn off whatever new visual effect or quirky little automation they've implemented. I can't tell you how much I actively don't want my braces to be matched up by a color that doesn't even have anything to do with my color scheme.

Ive tried switching but holy shit intellisense is such a great feature that helps me so much so I'm not always bouncing between docs and my editor. Which ATM I'm learning go and intellisense has more fucking information on the functions than the docs do. I've seen Neovim (which is what I'm probably switching to) has language servers that are similar to intellisense so I'm intrigued to try that.

I'm just tired of constantly having to avoid all this shit I don't give a fuck about. I just want to get in, do my thing.

I won't be surprised if I'm the only one on this train 🤣

I'm learning Rust as a case study for my own programming language. It's funny how many approaches exist to the humble loop.

- In classic procedural languages, a loop's job is to repeat actions, and as such it provides a multitude of tools to control this repetition.

- In all languages with iterators, a for-in loop is a construct that does something with every element of a collection. In languages with both iterators and generator functions, this can even be used to define a sequence in terms of another.

- In Rust, a loop is an expression that obtains its value through repeated execution. It can also be used like a classic loop, of course, but this is the interesting part.

- My little language is a functional language, so "loop" is the Y combinator. To loop means to define the value of an expression in terms of itself. It's the only looping construct, gets special treatment from the type checker and it's also used in recursive type definitions.

emacs, git and a decent shell like bash with at least gnutools

emacs, because I was searching for the right editor for years
- multi-platform
- extensible
- ready to type (no fucking mode change for typing like vim)
- programming functions like auto indenting, syntax highlight, auto complete, etc.)
- multiple windows in any arrangement
Additionally
- it is completely programmable to do anything you want
- you can find a solution to most common development needs on the web

git, because
- it is usable from small personal projects to heavy duty development
- fast branching and checking out, switching between different workpaths within seconds
- basic version control offline, you only need to be online for remote consolidation
- you don't have to think much about structure from the beginning, if in doubt just commit and your work is saved, then arrange the result when you're ready

sh/bash-like shell with gnutools, because
- simple tools do their job and try not to be smarter than the user
- tools can be combined in any possible and impossible variants
- powerfull scripting (although sh-syntax is often annyoing)
- open as many shells as needed, no single-instance problem as with some GUI-tools
- extensible with gazillions of other tools

And best of all, all these tools are available on all widely used desktop OS.

Once upon a time aka last week,

Was trying to fix an industrial automation software coded in Codesys. My company's standard library is riddled with bad documentation with a mix of English and German terminology.

Had to find out why a program kept crashing the program upon start up. Long story short and many stressful hours later, I found two functions in the standard library that caused an endless terminal process loop. Had to wrap the function in an 'if statement' so it would only run once. Function should have done this by default.

The evolution of code, in Python:
-Many scripts
-Refactor common functions into a Utility class
-Make the scripts into classes/methods with a "static main"
-Create a super script to run them all

I'd provide a screen shot of the last but to much propriety info... But yes it looks short and simple 😄😊

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

After getting fed up of “being productive” I fooled around on GitHub and had a look at the Stuxnet virus source code which was obtained using a decompiler. Experts who reverse-engineered it found out that it was written in “object-oriented C.” While C is not an object oriented language, anything you can do with classes you can do with structs, static functions, pointers & function pointers. You can see this coding style in the Linux kernel, CPython interpreter and many other places. That was the first indication that a government agency or defence industry was responsible. Amazing stuff !

Nothing like trying to understand a single 1500-line source file that implements the API usage in the frontend. Without a single comment.
No, wait. There are comments! But it's only commented-out code. Or explicit shit (like "gets the version" before a getAssetVersion function).

Functions with unused parameters? ✅
Weird var names (like "tmpX")? ✅
`console.log(var)` everywhere? ✅
Long-ass lines with 150+ chars? ✅
Duplicate code? ✅✅
Not a single interface was used so everything is var: any? ✅
Random unreadable RegEx? ✅
If-chains of 6+ more levels? ✅
Many `else if` towers instead of a switch? ✅
And did I mention it was written by a fucker who can't speak proper English so shit like visiable, cataloge and isExist is everywhere? Yeah.

Fun day at the office reading spaghetti code 🙃

I use the ICU format often for translation because it's simple enough and supported on many platforms. It's something of a standard so I can use the same translation string format and similar library functions everywhere.

ICU is like a really simple templating language, somewhere between printf and something like smarty or twig simplified and specifically intended for internationalisation.

I updated a library providing ICU compatible parsing and formatting for one of the platforms I'm using and find tests break. I assume that only thing to change is the API. ICU very rarely changes and if it did it would be unexpected for it to break the syntax in a major way without big news of a new syntax.

The main contributor of the library has changed since some time last year. Someone else picked up the project from previous contributors.

Though the library is heavily advertised as using ICU it has now switched to using a custom extended format that's not fully compatible and that is being driven by use case demand rather than standardisation.

Seems like a nice chap but has also decided for a major paradigm shift for the library.

The ICU format only parses ICU templates for string substitution and formatting. The new format tries to parse anything that looks XML like as well but with much more strict rules only supporting a tiny subset of XML and failing to preserve what would otherwise be string literals.

Has anyone else seen this happen after the handover of an opensource library where the paradigm shifts?

Love all lambda functions from c#, oh and extension methods. They make life way easier in c#.

From PHP: file_get_contents/file_put_contents. It does a simple job but allows many-many sources and protocols (like HTTP) to be used as sources.

Other than that - monkey patching in Ruby, wish every language had that, because there are a lot of closed-for-extension scripts out there, and when you need to override a specific thing in the code you cant.

PHP is so insecure and vulnerable that it makes me feel unsafe. It has so many features and settings that can lead to security risks, such as register_globals, magic_quotes, and allow_url_fopen. It also has so many functions that can execute arbitrary code or commands, such as eval, exec, and system.

It is like PHP was designed by a bunch of hackers who wanted to exploit every possible loophole.

This one time, at band camp. I seen this wait function named "wait_for_no_reason". Now I wonder how many actual wait functions are really necessary.

!Rant

TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.

MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....

A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);

Dear Systems Analyst,

I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.

In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.

Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.

Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?

.... The Systems Analyst replied:

Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.

Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.

Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.

Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).

Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.

When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.

It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.

Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.

To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).

DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.

BEST WISHES!

Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.

So I was wondering if any of you know if any good ways to inject additional functionality into a function in CPP. My use case is injecting a counter into an OpenGL draw function to see how many times per frame it's called. I know I can do this using assembly Inca more hacky manner as you might do for cheats in games(code caves), but I'm more interested in adding is for debugging/statistics for the game engine I'm working on. Basically im looking for a portable stable way of doing it that when I compile as a debug build, the code gets added to various functions, and when I compile under release, it doesn't.

Example:
glDraw();

Would call
glDraw() {
drawCount++; //some debug stuff
glDraw(); //call the real one internally
}

I should mention with code caves you can do this by saving the original address of the function, patching the vTable to point to your new function that has the same parameters etc, then all calls to that function are redirected to yours instead and then you simply call the original function with the address of the function you originally saved. That said, I'm not sure how to access vTable, etc the "normal" way...

If I kept track of all the hours wasted on issues due to overloads of functions called ToList() it would probably make up a sizable portion of the project budgets.

If I call ToList on a query object, it looks like I'm trying to serialize the query definition into some kind of array. That's what it *should* do with that name. Bonus if the object implements some generic enumerable interface, ToList makes it call your database, you can just toss the query into some json serializer that blocks while calling ToList for you, and people end up doing exactly this because the code turned out so much neater.

Because that's the thing. It's like people implement it because it's "neat" and the user shouldn't care about its internals. How many tears would be shed by just calling it ExecuteAsync?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the general Software Engineering rule of thumb again for frontend templating code?

If I look at certain websites, I notice some code smells in PHP such as:
$.modal = <?php echo $(base)["username"] != 'me' ?' ': echo 'style="display=none"' ?>

or just in general places in the code where PHP gets used as a templating engine for gluing together pieces of HTML code based on conditionals spread out over the codebase and the database itself too. To make things worse, this carries over to JavaScript ajax functions. As a developer, this to me just seems like spaghetticode.

On the other hand, many popular frameworks properly do templating, such as EJS, containing templating in one place and not mixing it with logic too much but just having simple output like <%= %>.

I know I've seen frameworks like Angular 1 contain pieces of HTML into directives, but maybe that's something different, more 'OO'-simulating or cleaner.

!rant
How to market an app?
So I am working on this very simple app. It has more or less one feature and also a quite limited target group. I make the app mostly for myself because I need this one function that it has but it would be nice to get a few bucks out of it (after I get the bugs out of it). I can't tell you what the app does (I realize I sound one of those "like facebook but..." people) but imagine those really simple apps like the many water level apps you can find in the app store but only musicians will ever need it.
So here is the question: should I limit functions and show adds and sell a pro version or only offer one version and always show adds? It will be a handy tool for those who really use it so maybe someone would consider buying it. On the other hand, the features are way too cheap to spend money on (who would buy a flashlight app?).
Thanks for your help!

I'm beginning to feel like any kind of specific approximation via neural networks is a myth. That if you can't reduce output to simple categorical values that can be broadly interpreted between two points, that it doesn't work.

I have some questions and they don't seem to be getting answered about the design of the net. How many layers should I use ? How many neurons per layer ? How does this relate to the number of desired quantitive scalar outputs I'm looking to create, even if they are normalized, they can vary GREATLY and will if I'm approximating the out of several mathematical expressions. Based on this and the expected error ranges of these numbers and how many possible major digits could be produced within the domain of the variable inputs being introduced, how many neurons per layer ? What does having more layers do ? In pytorch there don't seem to be a lot of layer types per say, but there are a crap ton of activation functions, and should I just be using these at the tail end or should they actually be inserted between layers so the input of the next layer passes through another series of actiavtion functions ? what does this do to the range of output ?

do I need to be a mathematician to do this ?

remembered successes removed quantifiable scalars entirely from output, meaning that I could interpret successful results from ranges of decimal points.

but i've had no success with actual multi variable regression as of yet, even when those input variables are only 2 and on limited value ranges eg [0,100] and [0, 2pi]

and then there are training epochs to avoid overfitting, and reasonable expectation of batches till quality results will start to form.

#Suphle Rant 9: verbatim exception scare

In multiple rants, I've bitched about laravel stealing suphle features. By some very weird coincidence, it appears I've been given a taste of my own medicine. Let me explain:

We're having a chat this morning on a laravel group chat when someone says he uses their notification component a great deal. Curious, I ask him what he uses it for since I only used it sparingly during my laravel days. To pry an answer out of him, I ask whether he uses them for sending app error alerts to a slack channel, and he responds with an eerily familiar term. I quickly look it up and the results on the docs are chilling: errors can be sent to bugsnag (which suphle has an integration for), sentry and Co. Errors can either be broadcast or disabled. Specific kinds of errors can be caught. My heart sunk. My brother called for something while I was going through it and I was struggling to pull myself together

Their exception component is almost identical to mine and I'm only just realising. It's shameful that I'm just learning about functionality present since 5.8. I thought my creation was novel. BUT! The good news is, the implementation differs

Too many errors went unnoticed during my time there because error broadcasting is optional. Since none of my colleagues read that part of the documentation, we were firefighting by pulling and wrangling production error logs. This informed their abolishment in suphle altogether

A relatively minor difference is in the APIs –their philosophy makes significant use of global functions, violating SRP, etc.

But the most important difference, that still cheers me up, is that they only catch known errors. Suphle has a construct for isolating calls to a decorated service. Any unforeseen error to occur during its execution will do a series of things before control is returned to the caller

typedef bool Bool;
Class Description
{
public:
inline Bool IsTypeA() const { return IsType(TYPE_A); }
inline Bool IsTypeB() const { return IsType(TYPE_B); }
inline Bool IsTypeC() const { return IsType(TYPE_C); }
Bool IsType(DescriptionType T) const { return (T == Type()); }
DescriptionType Type() const { return m_Type; }

private:
DescriptionType m_Type;
}

I can't make this shit up

It's so frustrating to explain rxjs pitfalls to the manager.

To avoid the diamond problems and glitches caused by combineLatest and debounceTime(0), I decided to use single stream with nested reactivity.

Then the manager asked me to use withLatestFrom instead of combineLatest.

Sure withLatestFrom makes sense to the original author, when the original author is able to remember the reactive graph and put proper dependencies to combineLasted/withLatestFrom accordingly, but anyone else who touches the component later needs to retrace the reactive graph to avoid the glitch. Sometimes it's just impossible when many dependencies are derived from combineLatest+debounceTime(0). When no one is trained to code reactively, I don't expect people to know where to put a dependency. After many trials and errors, the only way to avoid the diamond problem is to use nested reactivity where child streams are created within root stream each time root stream emits.

The mentioned manager put all sorts of side effects in observable chains. The manager keeps saying the stream is too large when their subscription functions (sometimes nested) are way worse with litered mutations everywhere. Anything in observable can be traced by go to definition but tracing side effects usually requires global searches.

Recently, he put startWith to the end of a synced stream to fix a bug where button would collapse when there is no content (initial null emission). Rather than fixing the default height, he thinks using startWith(defaultLabel) is a good idea. Of course, he doesn't know that a synced stream should only emit 1 value on new subscription and that extra emitted value will cause rxjs glich down the pipe.

I hate corporate jobs

Upgrading my tech skills.. Once again I feel my personal my personal dev environment and told are much more up-to-date than what I use at work.... Though the book Kim reading is on TDD and was written 3 years ago.

Maybe I should read another on in cloud services and ML... but don't have any motivation for these topics.

I need TDD for work because now we're emphasizing unit test coverage...

I usually only use manual functional tests to verify the final outputs as either the testing framework is broken (JS) or I don't have time to relearn the frameworks for the particular language...

Anyway got off topic... So questions after:

1. Do you ever feel your technologically always more ahead than what you do at work and essentially you bring skills to the job but you don't learn much out of it?

2. How do you test? I actually got into a bit of a argument/discussion with my colleagues about how to implement unit tests. Apparently there are 2 ways to test? Black box vs WhiteBox. She said she tests only Public methods using mock inputs, dependencies. She read online and seems there is an opinion that should only test public functions and if you can't then your app is designed incorrectly, not separated enough.

For me I test the private functions individually (WhiteBox/Java reflection) because the public one is like generateReport and as a whole is like a Pachinko machine, too many unique paths that would need a test case for.

So thoughts? Yes sorry for turning it into a remake I guess...

I just want to rant about my teacher who did not teach us on software engineering principles especially on version control and how we handle our code.
[This is Tl;dr section so I won't take your time to read] I just want your advice or opinions on students required to learn version control.

Now that there are many freshmen in our school, I want to teach them the very basics on version control. Our flaws as a group, when we are in developing our project is, there's only 1 person who handles all of the code and that's not very effective, the others were busy on the documentation and project management but not the code that the person wrote. I can relate to that person but I'm actually doing other task and review it. My group mates didn't review my code because it was written in Ecma Script(I refer to them as javascript). I put comments on every functions, conditions, and variables so that they could understand, but they don't.

So If you have any ideas please reply. I will read them and evaluate.