wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.

Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".

T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:

- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).

... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.

Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.

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

A year ago I would have said:

"Because I love solving logic puzzles, there's no greater joy than finding a very simple, elegant translation of a user's requirements into code"

Then 2020 came. I'm SO FUCKING FED UP with coworkers and managers who miss all the required competence to organize and communicate about projects as they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of working from home.

I'm quite sure I'm the last one to give up at my work.

The company chat has completely died down. I've tried setting up meetings, but even my bosses show up irregularly, confused about why I'm calling them in the middle of their Netflix marathon.

So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. My answer is now:

"I'm a developer because I get nearly 6 figures, for going through my Steam Library while completely shitfaced at 11AM. When I sober up in the afternoon, I work on some hobby projects. I get to spend 500/m on ordering sandwiches"

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

Found this on discord.
Could be copypasta but I decided to share it anyway.

"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux."

The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long."

With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Code archaeology.

Almost everything I fix/update/build requires a ridiculous amount of digging through and carefully studying the mountains of neglected, decaying, and shoddy code that make up these projects.

I spend maybe 10% of my time (and likely closer to 5%) actually writing code now. I miss it so much.

My anxiety is kicking in again.

I want to build something meaningful outside of work but my mind is blank, I have no ideas to implement, and whenever one pops up in my head, I DDG it, I find that there's someone who already built something similar and I lose all interest.
I want to code, but I'm tired of solving fictional problems.
I miss being excited to learn a new tech, since I know I would ditch it if I can't find anything to build with it.

This is causing me to lose all motivation to code and learn, I really hope this is just a phase ｡ﾟ･（>﹏<）･ﾟ｡

And it is official: I am not a project manager anymore.

My Boss has just created a new Automation department of which I am the only employee. So, now, I am an Automation Engineer.

More tools, maybe code and almost no contact with clients anymore. But I am gong to miss a few of them. :)

Just my $.02:

One thing I think a lot of students/schools miss when learning/teaching, is that your code has to be *maintainable*. Your code is (hopefully) going to be used for a long time, so program it to make it not only easy to upgrade and maintain, but easy for SOMEONE ELSE to upgrade and maintain, too.

The best code to work with is the stuff that's been coded with maintainability in mind.

It was friday evening and almost everyone in office had left. I was assigned a bug related to some of my code changes. I called my senior to help me debug (has three years of experience, whereas me having only one year exp, who is also a very good friend of mine *always helps in debugging*).
So the code goes

switch (someEnum) {
case One:
doSomething()
// no break
case Two:
t.x = someEnum
break
case Three:
.....
}

I had recently added new enun One and was reciting the code logic to him as we were looking through code.
Him: Hey you haven't set t.x in case One. How did you miss that?
Me: No look, I haven't but a break on it. It will go ahead and set it in next case.
Him: What are you talking about? if the someEnun is One why would it execute Two case. Lets copy that line up there and try it locally.
Me: No no no wait. Are you saying that groovy doesn't need breaks in switch (Me being new to groovy but good with Java).
Him: Why would you need break in switch case even in Java?
Me: *stares at him*
Him: I'm going to execute a psvm right freaking now.
Me: *while he writes the psvm* Why did you think there were breaks in switch in any code?
Him: Shut up. *writes psvm code cursing me everywhere*
*executes code*
No way. Really??
Me: Tell me why do you think are there breaks in switch.
Him: I though they were to get you out of switch block and not execute the default block.
Me: So were you coding switch until now without breaks?
Him: I don't know man. I'm starting to doubt all the switches I have ever written.
Me: Anyway that's not the problem, so moving on.
*a while later*
Him: If a interviewer would ask me how would you rate yourself in Java. I would be like "Well I worked on various projects for 3 years in Java, but didnt know why we put breaks in switch. So you figure it out yourself."

One of the best moments in office.

The worst part about having a job that is not related to programming is that I don't have as much time to code as I would like to :(

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Why is starting a C++ project so overly complicated and annoying?!

So many different compilers. So many ways to organize the files. So many inconsistencies between Linux and Windows. So many outdated/lacking tutorials. So many small problems.

Why is there almost no good C++ IDEs? Why is Visual Studio so bizarre? Why are the CMake official tutorials literally wrong? Why can't we have a standard way to share binaries? Why can't we have a standard way to structure project folders? Why is the linker so annoying to use?

Don't get me wrong, I quite like the language and I love how fast it is (one of the main reasons I decided to use it for my project, which is a game almost comparable to Factorio)... But why is simply starting to write code such a hassle?

I've been programming in Java for years and oh god I miss it so much. JARs are amazing. Packages are amazing. The JDK is amazing. Everything is standardized, even variable names.

I'm so tempted to make this game in Java...

But I can't. I would have a garbage collector in the way of its performance...

Sometimes I miss programming, but then I look at my programmer boyfriend's code and I'm like, "Never mind, I'm okay," and I go back to being carefree and happy while he's going grey from the stress. 🙆🏽

My little sister is running for Miss St. Patrick's Day in my home town. You vote via a link everyday. It looks like it is done via Angular and jQuery.. I happened to found the API that does the voting via their source code...

As a big brother I want so bad to add a few extra votes... but that's wrong... right?

For me, the worst co-worker is one who works by the principle of quantity over quality or a person who thinks quick and ugly fixes are a valid way to solve problems. Also: If there are unittest, don't fucking dare to change or remove them, just so your code runs without errors.

But in general, I just can't work with people who don't really think about what they are coding, people who just code straight ahead without making the simplest plan about how to solve something. Most of these people realize too late, that their approach was rather shitty, unreadable and unmaintainable.

I often see memes about "I forgot what I coded last [insert timespan here]". Though it is kind of normal, if it takes you too long to find out what you wrote, you should consider overthinking your coding approaches.

Just my 50 cents.

Damn I miss coding... 4 weeks of learning & exams is too long...

Have any of you already felt that you really like what you do (coding, of course, among other things), but you hate "the place(s)" where you work, specifically some of the people from there...?!?!?

It's 9AM, you already got your coffee, is comfortably sat, with your precious headphones, all ready for some gorgeous lines of code to gain life... but...

... your coworkers are arguing cos one prefer braces when using an single-line if statement, the other not...

... another one is discussing about how bad he's paid after discovering that a dev (at the same "level") receives more...

... the coordinator comes to convince you that the manager is not good, has not all the needed "certifications", and vice versa ...

... the designer didn't like the UX's work, and this is just an enough reason for a BIG gossip with the rest of the team (or even with people from other teams) ...

... the QA complains all the time about everything: the testing environments are a shit, the other QAs are a shit, the system is a shit, his life is a shit (even though he has not yet realized it) ...

Sometimes I miss that time when I got into the coding universe at home, giving my first steps and was creating things all the time... against the toxicity we find in a lot of enterprise "habitats"...

Christmas reminds me of my favourite development team ever. I first visited the team for a quick hello, before I started working with them, at Christmas time. Unlike the rest of the the company they had decorations and Christmas treats and the radio was on with Christmas songs. This set a very good impression.

When I did come to join them after the holidays I discovered that this team like having treats, would often sing songs together randomly and even make up new ones about their code on the spot. They had a great attitude to work and made the working environment a fun place to be. We did get lots done but I also learned so much being with them. When I left they wrote me a card filled with raps they had come up with reflecting my time with them. I still have that card.

I miss you guys dearly. Merry Christmas xxx

So being a sole developer at the company, full stack, you know, basically 24/7 job because you are the only one that knows what's going on.

I love my job but now that I'm not working with a team I miss code reviews and bouncing ideas off.

So, is there like a community or something where a sole developer can get this? Maybe more privately than SO or reddit or whatever

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.

We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".

It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.

So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.

Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.

Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.

Two things before this all:
- I fucking love gitlab so far
- I miss the fuzzy searching from sublime text, as vsCode still can't do it properly..

I was fed up with all the shitty overbloated git deployment scripts, sync scripts, automatic backup solutions and hosted git servers out there, so now my own solution is:

- remote git cloned local files
- local files are synced via dropbox, to easily edit them on any device
- all changes and deleted files are saved up to 1 year on dropbox
- remote has gitlab running and webhooks setup
- the webhooks point to my node scripts, which then rebase the code to its dedicated dev server
- daily server backup with 7 days roll
- cold storage backup each 30 days

Sounds like overkill, but from my experience, you really can't have enough places that have a backup, especially coldstorage backups.

My goal in general though is to have everything on my computer backupped and ready to go asap, if something happens.

I wanted to just use a virtual machine for development stuff, but that wouldnt be able to run on my laptop, so I need a more general solution, where I sync all configs and all projects across. (and have some sort of basic list of tools needed, so I dont need to remember them)

Found for example something for vscode to sync its settings and plugins via any sort of git, will give it a try in near future too.

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

I thought I would have all day to code after my family went on vacations for 2 months. Tbh, I miss them :( Coding and my cat are the only companions at home.

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

Call it mental disorder. Sickness. Masochism or just bein a demented individual...

But I used to work with classic ASP. Yes, my JS ran on servers before it was cool (I am the original tech hipster) and I was writing VBScript with it as well because why the fuck not?

And
I
LIKED IT.

Kinda miss it to be honest. Shit was simple as fuck, the downside of it was the "fuckLibrariesAndDoShitByHand.asp" mentality and consequence of using old tech....but I liked it.

Tutorials for that shit had to teach you damn near everything in one book, not just how to code it, but how to really work with servers on the bare minimum and one would learn sooo much. Now a days most books be like "this is how you do yo auth tokens..because all y'all mofockas should know this shit by now" NO mofocka! Our books was all about "aaaallrighty dipshit, this shit here is auth, and in order to bla bla blah" THOROUGHT AS FUCK B.

So yeah......i had fun, by far not my first choice on new shit, but shit was fun.

When you start a new project with 2 more developers. You see their CVs and they look experienced.

(Fast forward one month....)

You realize you are the most experienced one and they are waiting for you to guide and mentor them.
The worst of all I thought I was going to learn from them because I still am not ready to mentor other people.

Aaaaaand now I am panicked.

I miss the time where I used to sit in my corner, do the tasks that was given to me and that's all. Now I have to code, build documentation, assign tasks, etc. I am not ready for this. I never asked for this. I just wanted to be a developer. :( :P

My designer just had an user interview where the user is a developer and my designer showed him the mock-ups of a no code tool that we are building, asking the dev for his input.

She literally had a session with a guy announcing him that we are building a tool that will put him out of work and moreover asked him for inputs so that we miss no use case.

And in another story, one of my dev lead decided to decommission an entire feature and replace it will a hacky solution because the devs in her team were not comfortable using the current design in their development stage. Hence, without user research, any strong use case, or considering business implications, she went ahead and drafted the entire approach on how to fuck everyone.

I am out of my honeymoon phase at my new org and I am scared. Shit scared.

Help, I don't know if I want to code as a job for the rest of my life.
I feel that I miss physical activity in my job. Its just sitting and programming.
I like programming, it's an infinite series of puzzles, and I like puzzles. But more physical would be nice.

Maybe I should find a 2nd job that is more physical and balance the two.

What is everyone's thoughts on this?

I haven't written a single line of code in three weeks and it's starting to hurt. I need a summer project of some kind but my brain isn't doing any idea-generating moves. Woe is me, this semester hasn't even ended yet and I already wish the next one would start right now 😂😭

Never thought I'd reach a point where I'd miss code (not my passion, simply a means to an end) but here we are.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

Okay it's FUCKing rant time... FUCK you prestashop!

FUCK your utterly bizarre "coding standard"
Also a big FUCK your config files, since when did config files start to include application logic, multiple includes/requires and modification of super-globals. When did I miss that memo?

This file is full of so much FUCKing horseshit, my FUCKing testicles hurt.

FUCK your "module overrides", yes let's duplicate 20-30MB senseless horror code into another folder, just so we can modify one line, without having future updates breaking our stuff.

And your attempt to migrate to a symphony stucture is FUCKing pathetic, do it properly, or don't do it at all.. FUCKtards..

I know wordpress can be bad, but this...
Prestashop takes FUCKing lousy, headache/cancer- giving, piece of crapware to the next FUCKing level.

I wouldn't even wish this FUCKing upon my worst enemy.

!rant

Goodbye Java I will not miss you at all! I swear ...

I do like it when making web services (especially that I can use Java8) but for Android you have been a torture. Hello sweet Kotlin! I shall embrace you and treat you like my newly born baby!!

Story is:
Working on a new project where I need to talk to a web service (also made by me).
Started writing in Java, all is cool and unit tests pass.
Downloaded Android Studio 3 Beta 1 and converted my Java code to Kotlin, That AsyncTask did not look nice in kotlin, converted it to async & await feature and I must admit lots of code removed, no more need to create a new fucking AsyncTask every time the app sneezes for data!

I feel like I'm working with C# but with difference in syntax.
My life is now complete :)

i asked my senior "why we need a develop branch" and his reply was "-_-" , literally an emoji.

Ok ,well this might be a stupid question, but i have been in this organisation for 6 months and all this time these guys have not been able to make a proper release. either they miss commits while cherry picking, or they end up reverting stuff, or they are delaying the releases due to QA disapprovals, backend issues or management issues.

i proposed a simpler vcs :

1. `uat` is the source of truth
2. for every release we create a temporary branch `release-x.y.z` from `uat`
3. then we develop every feature in a branch cut from `uat` as `feat-abc`, code in it , and merge it back to `release-x.y.z`
4. finally we merge `release-x.y.z` into `uat`

where is develop branch supposed to be cut?
which branch is supposed to be cut from develop?
which branch is supposed to merge into develop?
where is develop supposed to be merged?

no one has answers to these fucking questions. but still they wanna confuse the whole team of 15+ android and ios devs about how to use which procedure

fml :/

Hi devs,

i am just curious, how often you use devrant.

to be honest,.. if my life is good.. no bugs. no miss management. I don't even remember devrant exist..

but as soon as I got frustrated from code,management, life.. Devrant is the first thing I type of my browser before starting any work :P

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

The job hunt is exhausting but trying to keep a positive mindset coz my prospects look good so far. Just cant wait to be done with the interviews (hopefully within the next two weeks) and get back to reading books and binging series when i am not working without the guilt of i should be studying and won’t forgive myself if I don’t pass due to laziness.
I also actually miss writing code and working on a team. Remote work made me realize I absolutely love being a software engineer, i just hated going to the office.
Pls send positive vibes for my upcoming interviews 🙏🏾

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

My (pseudo)code:
//Cursor1.Open ()
//Cursor2.Open ()
//Cursor2.DoStuff ()
//Cursor2.Close ()
//Cursor1.Close ()

Prof: Why do you have Cursor1 in there if you don't use it?
Me: Because it doesn't compile if I take it out.
Prof: Why?
Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I miss the shit I could get away with in grad school.

Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.

Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.

One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.

At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"

And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.

But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?

I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.

What do y'all ninjas think?

I'm in a situation here, I had an idea for an app and I started coding it. Since I'm a front end developer I find it not amusing to do the backend part. I then started to share the idea and such with good classmate (not a coder). I then made him join me on this adventure. After a lot of coding he said he wanted to contribute with something since I'm coding all day and he's not. Then we agreed freelancing the back end part.

Some time later we got a pretty good deal on some Indians doing the whole app. I thought to myself "this feels kinda good!" so we went on with the freelancer.

Days went to months and we finally got the app back. I did a mistake of paying him all the milestones without testing the app in its wholeness, later finding out that one part of the login system didn't work. That lead to a deeper debug to find out that the core function of the app was commented out.. I then wrote the freelancer back with minimal and slow response.

Now the deadline of the app is like in 2 months. If not we miss a whole year.

My classmate knows about this and he's the one who played for the freelancing. Now we have talked about me doing the whole backend myself.

The only issue I have now is that I feel like he's just sitting home doing nothing other than flashing money around and me busting my ass of writing code that I really am not good at. (basically learning more than coding)

But he played a lot of money for this.. So I feel kinda bad for him.

Rip life.

Started about 4 years ago after losing my job in social work. Realized I liked computers more than talking to people. Picked up a beginning Java text book, and worked through it in a month. I moved over to web development to help a buddy of mine and kill time while unemployed.

Since then, I've run a small web dev business and am currently director of technology for a company with an international presence. I still code on the side an recently launched a new mobile app with a buddy of mine from grade school.

I do not miss social work even a little bit.

I've been using visual studio for years and always found debugging pretty fun. At my new job I have to use xcode and FUCK DEBUGGING IN THAT ILLEIGBLE SHIT TIER DEBUGGER. and fuck objective-c, at least you can ignore the objective part and just code c..
I never thought I would say this, but damn, I miss Microsoft.

I've only been here for 1 month for my new position in Ops, and I already miss software development!

All I do everyday is just typing commands on the terminal.
If I am feeling fancy, I may create a script or two (that's the closest thing I have to writing code).

I hope I can get more interesting thing to do in the future. If not I can't see myself doing this in long term. It's OK for occasional tasks or added responsibility but I don't want to do it as my main job.

When youre hired as a programmer and you miss programming. you code at home Because your work wont let you. Too many documents to create, too many tickets(IT operations) to create and too many phone calls(follow up on IT operations).

It feels like im wasting my days on a job that i dont care. Thank God for self projects.

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

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

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

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

Also, it play beautifully nice with vs code.

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

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

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

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

I feel stupid with this language.

And that is fine.

Ex boss bought Embarcadero Delphi, Tokyo release and showed me how the environment looks like.

Its beautiful.

Say whatever you want. The dude would shred out large af projects and soultions from delphi faster than anything else I would have seen in other places.

The bad thing about it is that be was the only one that could do it because he was the only one that knew how to use it...the docs for it suck(imho) although reading code for Delphi was easy, tedious since it was literally a top bottom like a book sort of deal, but easy.

Kinda miss it to be honest. It was an interesting experience and people do look for delphi developers and pay them a lot, wonder if I would get another chance at it one day. We were designing some rather large systems with it and it was not web oriented(for web he used ASP :P my boi was unique eh?)

Oh well, well see

Worst documentation? Unreal Engine 4's documentation on editor customization (custom panels/windows and whatnot). It might have improved in the last two years, but the last time I made a custom editor there was almost zero documentation on the matter and on their Slate UI framework. The little documentation that existed was very vague and had awful examples.

I don't remember very well, but I think it took me close to two weeks to get something very basic working. I had to read a LOT of C++ code filled with generics and macros to figure everything out, but after I did I enjoyed a lot working with that stuff.

I just don't know how I was able to do that, working with UE4 was a pain the butt every. single. day. Runtime error on the gameplay code? Too bad, the whole editor will crash and then take ~40s to reopen. It was crash after crash, ~1min of compilation time for any little change to the code, so so so so much frustration.

I do miss a those times a bit though, because even though it was hard, it felt good to feel competent, to know something complex reasonably well to the point I could help people on forums. Today I always feel I don't know enough about the languages/frameworks I use. It's kinda depressing, it takes a huge toll on my self confidence. But whatever, let's keep going, one day I'll get there :)

Three days ago my focus was shifted from a development role to a support role. I was shifted to replace another support guy who had used fraud to get the position. I have no experience with this role but there was decent KT and I'm catching on fine. During onboarding and KT I'm serving as the first contact for new tickets and whatnot...

Today I got a ticket with an error on our production instance that no one had ever seen before. It prevented the guy from using our service entirely. I tried to reproduce it and... I couldn't use the service either. No one could. Everything was down. I could see the sweat building on my manager's forehead.

Thankfully another member on my team has done a bit of support before, so we collaborated with each other and other teams throughout the day to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. I'm listening to them chat remotely as we speak - so far I've been working on it 9 hours straight.

This service is used by everyone - it's a business critical service with due dates on actions and escalations to managers... Imagine if the support ticketing service for your company crashed. That means a lot of people are asking what's wrong, requiring extensions, etc. I've been answering to managers and seniors in the business throughout the day.

The best part? We figured out why the server went down, and the reason is fantastic: someone updated the server's code without telling anyone, and all they had done was remove critical parsing code. Just took it right out, pushed, redeployed. We don't know who did it or who even has access to do that. I guess I have some detective work cut out for me after we've fixed everything that was broken by that.

I miss coding already.

!rant
The best experience I had as a student was attending a few masters degree classes at a computational arts course, it was awesome being the only developer in the middle of a lot of art graduated students who were learning to code. Awesome exchange experience, final projects were art exhibitions with interactive art. We used Arduinos, Rpi, Openframeworks, Processing. I miss that and I still think that my dream job will look like that.

@dfox, @trogus, would you consider adding the topic for next week to be "Near miss: how I almost lost all my code/data"?

It sould be fun, and people can also learn something. Like what not to do, how to recover and how to prevent this kind of stuff...

My last job I worked with one other dev, she always thought her code was PERFECT and the way she did things PERFECT, she enjoyed pointing out flaws in my code or web sites in our big marketing meeting with out executives. Yeah won't miss her one bit

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

"Non-technical" users must have some magic skill that goes beyond my understanding. How can anyone work with no-code page builders? I tried Wix, Webflow, Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, and Semplice. Each one sucks in their way, but they have one thing in common: their UI behaves even more erratically than Microsoft Word.

Is there a "non-technical personal computer user" class where people learn that logic? How did they manage to hide their secret understanding from developers? Or what did I miss?

I really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.

I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.

I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.

Not specifially one but a couple of minor mentoring moments.

I started out at a rather small company (<10 people) with a completely new language to me (Perl).
I had some trouble following along some tasks since I wasn't familiar with Perl or generally backend stuffs at all.
So the person that was supposed to "mentor" me was just giving me tasks without any hints of how to do things, this is where my "true" mentor came in to play.
I asked him a couple of things after a few unsuccesful searches on the internet and he always seemed to have the answer to it right away! It seemed like he knew everything and I really appreciated his patience and help. He did point me in the right directions when I needed it.

He left the company about 3 months ago and I still somewhat miss his mentoring existance, as he wasn't only a code but also a life mentor.

I really hope that one day I can be just like that guy, helpful, patient and be a mentor for someone else. :)

I am not a php dev and I have nearly 0 knowledge of php. All I know about php is that xampp is your friend and you have to write that $ everywhere. But that one day I had to setup phpLDAPadmin on apache2.
I have nothing against php, but I just don't want to have anything in common, since I'm just perfectly fine with my java.
So I had to make it work. Fought my way through different incompatible versions of php and phpldapadmin only to see "not found" on phpldapadmin.
I thought, like, wtf?? Especially when index.php of apache2 is displaying just fine? I mean, I can "edit" some php code, but configs and php setups are just something like out of my world. Tried setuping it on different vms - same result. I've buried way too many hours into this with no result. Finally I gave up and contacted a friend of mine which is like php god for me. He did same thing as I did in ~ 10 mins, but the result was the same. Tweaked some configs - same. Scratched his head, sat for 5 more minutes, did something and boom - it works!
I've asked him, what is that php magic and the answer killed me:
"Index.html was missing"

At that moment I just wanted to exit through the window. Sadly, there were no way to open it.

Yes, I am this stupid in php. But I still miss all these wasted hours...

Who else is fed up of memes on Facebook like 'She was upset because I didn't talk to her. She didn't know that it was because I missed a semicolon in my code'

Really?? WTF compiler do you use dude? Because of such shitty memes, couple of my non-dev friends asked me how frequently I miss the semicolon in my code?! I said never because:
1. I am not a dumb coder to compile my programs with any syntax errors.
2. Even if I do, I fix it in a minute.

:| WTF really! These dumbheads don't make memes on bugs.

After I have been using tabnine and Grammarly for quite some time, I thought I follow this years' hype and give GitHub Codepilot a try, before eventually considering chatGPT.

Added Copilot to my IDE, proceeded to extend behavioral test descriptions in JavaScript.

Copilot suggests the most redundant and irrelevant inline comments I can imagine. They would be a legitimate target of criticism in every code review.

Wasn't it supposed to add some code that's actually useful? Well, tabnine and JetBrains IDEA annotations already did that anyway.

What did I miss?

How do i handle code review as a junior developer?
I understand its need and I don't want to skip it.
But I feel under confident after code review when my mistakes are pointed out. They always seem so trivial and wonder how did I even miss them. How should I handle such situations? And how do I improve from here?

I resolved to spend more time with the family this month, leaving my laptop behind when visiting them for the end of the year.
Now, 10 days later we're all bored of each other and I truly, deeply, and most sincerely miss my beloved laptop.
All I can do is refresh the devRant app, and fantasise while reading about others working on their machines, and posting formatted photos of code snippets. Like some weird, twisted form of instagram-addiction.

Hi. I just wanted to share I failed the google online interview. Thought I was prepared, I vomit and had diarrhea 30mins before the interview, Always makes mistakes on google docs. I keep pressing tabs which uglifies the code, miss-spelled my variables and functions name, mistakenly put everything in const (I got used to my editor yelling at me when I used const instead of let, should not rely on this). But there's always next time. I hope.

Failed to make a decent demo for client because spaghetti code. I want to work on the project to sort out codebase to avoid same thing happening again, boss wont hear it and switches me to another project of which I have little knowledge of the stack when we have another guy who has experience in it.

My main project (the one I want to sort out) is so big it should have 4 people full time on it, but it has me and one part time outsourced contractor. I was hired as a meteor dev and he makes me work on an angular project like its totally easy to switch from meteor to node+angular+Jade.

I am a junior dev, boss has no idea how to project manage and ignores advice I give him.

This is going to be hell when we miss deadlines and have to explain to the client why their product has so many bugs.

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

!rant
Just started a side project, helping a friend make his Android app more stable and add a couple more features. We'll release the sources sometime later.

Gotta say, his code is just terrible. And it runs on top of some code written by someone else, and that's even worse.
But I don't know how I got the motivation to spend the whole Saturday cleaning it up, fixing warnings, making abstractions, extracting features to separate classes, converting some stuff to Kotlin, even adding a couple coroutines. It felt good fixing bad code.

Maybe because I have some coding freedom I kinda miss at work.
Maybe because the project is not that big.
Maybe because I know the guy has many skills, coding is just not one of them.
Maybe because that project has some cool in it I can't even describe.
Maybe because that's entirely within my skills but challenging enough to have fun working on it.
Or maybe is just the mood of the moment, and in a week or so I'll lose all the motivation, as it happened too many times.

🤷‍♂️

been exploring the options for cross platform desktop app, and i found :
java : both awt and swing look ugly, i really like OOP of java, and the way projects are organized is easy to scale, but i need to deploy the jdk, and the speed on gui apps isn't that great
C# : (.net/ mono, i can't grasp F# and vb is stupid) looks native on windows, not so much alien on both linux/mac, and being a java cousin is a pro, i found the Eto library for mono even looks more native on *ix than winforms
wxwidgets: for C/C++ so far this looks like the best option for total native feel and performance, but man i fucking hate C code, and this looks a lot like C code, even with proper native Cpp support, maybe i should dive deeper in it
GTK+ : did any one mention C code ? because this mother fucker is plain C with macros all over the place, it made me realize why wx is promoted as Cpp friendly, i doubt I'll use this
tcl/tk : even tho ive never wrote a single line of tcl in my life, the tk lib is the default ui for both python and ruby on all supported platforms,
and i really love ruby, and Python is Usually a joy to work with
Qt : this by far looks like the best option, proper OOP in C++, bindings for python (ruby binds are outdated), almost native look and feel on supported platforms, and even has a gui builder in xml or json/js (qml) however i bet I'll use such a thing, the building tho depends on an external preprocessor "moc" and some wicked macros, also makes working with templates a fucking mess, and the heavy dependence on QObject inheritance makes integrating external libraries a bit more tiring, the signal slot system makes more sense in python than in C++, since it makes me confused about the flow of the code
lazarus: is a freepascal implementation that looks and feels like delphi, not so much for native look and feel, but good performance and easy language to handle
electron : this fat mofo is fat, it's the slowest of all options, if i want an html app, I'll just compile a stripped down webkit and deploy that
what do you think ? and did i miss something ?

Learning Java after learning python for School and helping the new programmers who are in the class I finished last term. I see python code and get nervous because there’s no semicolons or curly brackets, but then again I’m like “Fuck I miss python!”
But I’m usually the go to guy when people need help because I make YouTube tutorials for my colleagues to help them understand what I’ve learned, and share flash cards on quizlet, and generally tell anyone if you need help I’ll help.

I'm so fucking tired. Forget work, classes and housekeeping are so exhausting, I'd rather numb my brain with another useless code at the office. i was very tempted to stay at work today and miss class

Whats your weirdest bug/issue in your code? Which you couldnt figure out why, but it was something simple and you was Like ”oh how could i miss that...” etc.

I need to have some fun in my life right now haha.

Sitting here debugging my SQL code that creates tables and references for a project. I always forget how easy it is miss the small stupid things like typos in your names. Nothing like debugging to remind you of how much of a dense idiot you are.

It is amazes how much brain can be wasted with react.
In those 7hours (impressed myself by my bullshit withstanding), it took me 20min to understand a fucking api and how objects relate altogether, 1h to make the tut
and 5+fucking hours to understand how to plug the components.
I did use vue and backbone before and am 5y nodejs user.
seriously react is a bag of shitty magic.
I don't even want to try to read the code source yet, this could be the fatal move...

Oh. and also. people have to stop with jsx, it is so so so wrong. new syntax with new errors just for a fucking syntaxic sugar for saving a pair of parenthesis!!!!
like it matters after having installed 1e2+ MB of dependancies for a SPA of 10 components...

The only thing we miss is a react IDE to support JSX. #wheregoesthefront
And I am not even to the point of data flow and pubsub hells which i will be sure will be gold as well

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

So I'm on one project which was previously developed (I mean poorly developed) by another firm.

So this fucking guy who has done all the coding, I just fucking hate that guy because he has the shittiest logic and he doesn't know things should always be dynamic.

So he has written code(in PHP) where he has calculated the difference between DateTime and he is adding days, hours and minutes to another DateTime.

And it took me fucking 5hours to realize that he just forgot there is a thing called month which should be considered while doing this, I mean WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

It was calculating like the difference between
2018-07-12 and 2018-09-18 are FUCKING 6 DAYS WTF!!!! SERIOUSLY? HOW COULD SOMEONE MISS THIS?WTF?!!!! FUCKING 5 HOURS FOR THIS?

Hush!! I think it is my bad that I thought it is DateTime issue and focused on that. I feel good now. Thanks.

My fellow devs, appreciate what you have right now, even if it doesn't seem that great. I've recently switched majors from Bioinformatics to Medicine and I wouldn't say I regret it, but I do certainly doubt this decision sometimes. While studying Bioinformatics, I was always really interested in the biological part, often wanting to learn more about medical topics and such, thinking if I did switch, I could always keep programming as a hobby. Now I did switch and I miss being in a professional CS field so much. Medicine is great, but the people who study are mentally completely different from people that code. I still code small projects on the side, but don't really have anyone to talk to about them and I'm even starting to regret not paying more attention in linear algebra. I miss linear algebra, think about how ridiculous that is haha. Anyways, if you are looking forward to a major change in your life, it might not be all that you think it will be. So look at your current situation, it might be what you wanted all along.
Thanks for listening.
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Also it is incredible, how technologically incompetent most medical students are lol

while I can appreciate good process I sometimes miss the thrill of pushing code from my dev machine to production. hey it works at my desk what could go wrong?

Maybe you people will like this story.
The past semester I studied Java in class. First time doing object oriented programming, I had an annoying teacher but got the hang of it. I still miss C from the last year.
As a final project we had to do any program and apply some stuff we saw in class (The program should have an array list, use interfaces, bla bla bla bery simple stuff). It also must have a complete documentation, a manual and a diary explaining what was developed every week. Bonus points if it was in a repository like GitLab.
I wanted to do an RPG game in a matrix, like a rougelike or an old FF game, that should be a map or two, a few monsters and items and that's it. Enough to show what can I do and to have enough excuses to apply everything that the teacher asked. I had a team with two friends who wanted to do the same.
After making accounts in three different pages that apparently would help us to be more organized (One to make charts and two task trackers) I lost all patience and made an account in GitLab, made the basic classes that we had defined in a chart, divided the tasks and put them in to do on GitLab and we started to work.
One of my companions caused a lot of problems. First, he didin't wanted to learn how to use GitLab (I simply asked them to do merge requests) and he insisted to use GitHub. Then he started to say that using the console version was even better (Pretty sure he said thet he never used Git, but maybe was gas poisoning). The GitLab repository never had a single commit to his name.
BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER all the entire time, he was complaining about the graphical interface of the game, wanting to use some SDK for RPGs that he found. I told him that we will see that at the end, that first we should have all the mechanics done, test it in ASCII in the console and then, if we have time, we will put the visual interface, separated and optional from the main program to avoid problems.
After two weeks where he gave me very simple standard stuff late, half done and through Google Drive, I discovered he was most of the time working on... the graphical interface SDK! He took the job already done by me and the other guy and making a pretty hardcoded integration with the graphical interface and making everything that he tought it would be necesary. Soon enough the GitLab repository was totally outdated and completly useless. He had the totallity of the project in his half broken laptop, and sometimes he gave us a zip with all the code, outdated after a few minutes. Most of the stuff that I made was modified, a lot of the code was totally unknown to what it was and I had no idea even of how the folders were organised.
We had a month to finish it. I got totally disconected from the project and just hoped for the best, sometimes doing a handful of generic and adaptable lines of code for a specific thing (Funny enough, many core mechanics were nonexistent). The other guy managed to work more on the project, mostly fixing the mess that the guy did: apparently he didin't read the documentation of the SDK and just experimented and saw tutorials and tried to figure out how to do what he wanted.
Talking about documentation: we dont had yet. The code wasn't even commented propely. We did all that the last week and some stuff was finished the last night. The program apparently worked but I had no idea.
Thank God, the teacher just looked over everything and was very impressed by the working camera and the FF tiles. I don't think he saw the code or read too much of the documentation, much less when I directly wrote how I lost all access to the project.
I had a 10/10. I didin't complained. Most easy and annoying ten I ever had. I will never do a project with that guy.

had been working on a code for 10 hours and when i thought it was finally ready, without any errors, the compiler bi#ch killed my satisfaction for a f#@king ';'
never miss the semicolon, lessons from day 1. ://

Situation - I am responsible for refactoring and performance improvements in a company with several teams. This means I gotta do static analysis on code, run compliance tools and make changes in code or in the deployment pipeline, make sure the cloud is configured properly etc.,

Here is the catch when it comes to working on a ticket- the Azure team does not give my team permissions to make the necessary changes in the cloud. The Azure team won't pick up the ticket and do it themselves either.

Instead, we take the ticket, read the docs, take a guess on what's right or wrong. Then proceed to inform the Azure team who then go on to make that change. It is very hit or miss and often the ticket comes back to us and we do the same process again. Sometimes I have to spin up resources on my personal Azure account to tinker with settings to see which knobs are there for making changes to a resource.

Either pick up a ticket and work on it yourself, or give us azure with sufficient rights for us to be able to make the change. This midway status is infuriating, super unproductive and painful for us. Is this common? I am so frustrated.

College has been rough, especially when I've been having my hand held through 12 years. More stuff to learn, to do; and my life hasn't been great.

It's official that I'm following Chemical Engineering, specifically Food Engineering major (or whatever the heck it's called). I still code but I'm not sure if I'm gonna get to the level of the properly-trained folks. Heck I don't even know DFS and BFS and they seem important.

So yea, I'm not dead, just on life support. What did I miss on dR since July guys?

What I hate the lost about exam season, is the lack of coding... Spend two months cramming all the theoretical parts of computer science, and it just gives no time to code