Master Coder Unlocked!

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

If you couldn't work any more as a coder / programmer / hacker / it-master-guru, what would your profession be?

Like, not your ideal profession, but the most likely thing that you would end up doing outside of the dev world.

So I have this best friend who is almost 10 years younger than me. (I'm turning 40 this month). He's a full stack web dev, nodejs-god, react-maniac, you name it. He fucking LIVES to code the most amazing shit I have seen to date.

I, on the other hand, am that old, little overweight PHP coder webdev with a shitload of experience in that field (17th year now), also with linux webserver administration and all the JavaScript knowledge I need in m job.

Sitting next to him and doing some fun coding sessions always makes me feel like I am that "slow, fat kid in class"... while he is the coding master.

Sitting at work (marketing agency) where I started as the new webdev 10 months ago, I still feel like the coding guru because even the web 'developers' don't know jack shit yet (coz they never had to).

It's fine, they are learning and want to learn.

All I wanna say that even though one might be seen as a senior dev by some, he might sometimes feel like a junior dev when he's around others.

beginner coder: figures out how to write a feature

average coder: knows a few different ways to write a feature. but not quite sure on which one to use.

master coder: meditates before starting a project. closes his eyes to map out the entire infrastructure of the project.

god coder: gets paid ALOT of money to guide people on the right to do it.

begin_rant()

I like that coding is becoming more and more popular.

I like that more and more people are taking steps to manifest there ideas and potentially change the world.

But for fuck's sake... can't geeks be allowed to be the fat pimply introverts of the olden days?? This used to be a realm for the misfits, and now the same assholes who tormented said misfits are joining in and making the rest feel inadaquit all over again. You can't just be a coder anymore, now you have to be a good looking and health crazed professional with great personal skills and then somehow be able to also be a master of your craft.

I don't want to hear about how you write code in between your 100 pushups and avocado toast and having a few cold ones with the boys after your <insert sport here> game. I want to hear about how you ate pizza with one hand and crushed your build with the other in between sips of shitty soft drinks and fistfuls of candy while pulling an all nighter for the nth time cuz daylight is for pussies.

Too much pressure these days as it is, and this isn't helping.

break

My colleague is what you would call a cowboy coder. He solves problems with really complex solutions that only he understands and does not seem to care about that the team doesn't understand it. He's super fast and very skilled, but it leaves the rest of the team hanging. He sometimes works at his spare time so things we worked on the previous day can be totally changed the next day without any notice. He has also removed code written by someone else because he did not like it, in secret. I found this while browsing through commits that were committed directly to master without a PR.

We have tried talking to me about this but it doesn't seem to work. He seems to value speed over anything else and doesn't seem to have any respect for other team member's opinions.

What the hell do I do? Has anyone else worked with a similar typed person? He's really making my life hard and I think it's very frustrating. Please help.

Am I the only one who really wants to watch "Master Coder" ?

A real grand Master coder only needed a notepad and terminal

Michelin star Chefs, Chefs, sous chef, pastry chefs, cooks, burger flippers; they all prepare food.

I think that development is heading becoming a service industry. Millions of developers at the low end making next to nothing with less at the top making more; sometimes much more.

Then there will be shows like "Master Coder" where something is white boarded out and the contestants have a limited time to write the function.

Let's face it: I am and will always be a tinkerer. Yes, I know my ways around, I can sneak into legacy code bases easily and throw new stuff in there, I've seen software stacks. But scarcely sound design, really modular. Even from the cleverer, experienced ones. They can master more complexity, so they can handle more spaghetti. Some essay from the 80's had this grand idea to organically 'grow' software. That's how it looks like most of the times: cancerous, parasitic super fungi (armillaria). Yeah, we all know have to fight bit-rot and entropy, but it was all lost before already. We'll never get rid of legacy protocols, legacy code.
And even when we go green field, start a fresh. Yeah, take a great design, make everything new, after some months of throwing features and outer constraints at the thing, it's the same old mud again.
But we can still dream on: some day I will design great APIs, I will have great test coverage, documentation, UML design, autometed tests, fuzzing, memchecking, I'll work professionally, clean coder style.
Pfft forget it. Maybe change for consulting, because we'll continue to dream of the 'clean' code, so you can sell the next 'recipe', development method. It's like diets. As effective. For the one selling.

Around the time Apple was denouncing it, I joined a chatroom for Adobe flash game developers. I really loved the idea of making games too, so I tried to learn ActionScript3. That failed, because it was my first language and since I was broke, I couldn't afford flash pro, so I was using an open source ide with okay documentation, but no newbie coder tutorials. I didn't actually start learning to code till Codecademy came out, I learned js, then I learned visual basic and Java for online courses the local community college had available, and now I'm taking C, C++, Java, and Python in college while I use C# at work and JS during my free time. Sadly, in a jack of all trades, master of none :/

Use
git branch --merged
to get, you guessed it, all the branches you have merged.

Use
git branch -d <branch-name>
To delete a branch if it has been merged (use -D for forced)

And Use,
git branch --merged | egrep - v "(^\*|master|dev)" | xargs git branch - d

To delete all the branches that you have merged (but not anything with master/dev in their names)

Sorry for the formatting, I don't know how coder formatting works on DR..