This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

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Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

I recently started naming my devices in a certain scheme:
Laptop - Sagittarius (central black hole in the milky way)
Server - Sirius (brightest star visible from Earth)
Pi - Centauri (closed star system to us)
Any iot devices would be named like unnamed planets (i.e. Centauri A, Centauri B, ...)

Do some of you have cool/interesting naming schemes for your devices?

When a senior developer changes your impeccable code and pushes their ugly indented lines with bad naming scheme without review.

It's 5 AM and I don't want to shit on anybody's party but trust me when I say most of you here complaining about legacy code don't know the meaning of the word.

As someone who maintained a PHP4 codebase with an average file length of 3000+ lines for almost 4 years, I feel you, I feel your pain and your helplessness. But I've seen it all and I've done it all and unless you've witnessed your IDE struggle to highlight the syntax, unless you had to make regular changes in a test-less SVN's working copy that **is** the production and unless you are the reason that working copy exists because you've had enough of `new_2_old_final_newest.php` naming scheme, you do not know legacy. If you still don't believe me bare in mind I said "is" as in: "this system is still in production".

But also bare hope. Because as much grief as it cost me and countless before me, today of all days, without a warning, it got green lit for userbase migration to a newer platform. And if this 20 years of generous custom features and per client implemented services can be shut down even though it brings more profit than all the other products combined, so can happen to any of your projects. 🙏

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

Could do with some dev input here.

Going to rename most of my projects before I start them up again just for some consistency amongst everything so...

Because I name my projects internally as a different tree for each milestone (1.0 is maple, 2.,0 is pine etc) I'm going to have my other stuff follow a tree related naming scheme, first up is my game engine/framework...

It's currently called the 'Mod Engine' but I have 3 idea's and want to know people opinions

- Woodsman Engine
- Lumberjack Engine
- Lumber Engine

Which is best do you think or can anyone think of any better ideas? :-3

Another rant about my school: the default password system.
Each student's username is FirstnameLastname, and the same applies to teachers. The passwords assigned are <First initial><Last initial> for students, and the same for teachers with "teacher" appended to the end. As students, we figured out this system pretty quickly, and we were able to log into the computer system as any teacher who we knew had requested an account. (Teacher accounts had unfiltered Internet access, student accounts did not).
I now teach in this school, where they recently got Google Classrooms accounts for each teacher during Covid. The accounts use the same naming/password scheme! I somehow doubt the teachers replace their passwords, so any student clever enough to figure out the system can log into their Google for Education account.

Prefix variables with his name, andy1, andy2, andy3. Hilarious naming scheme

Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMAScript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language. ECMAScript 2016 (ES7 or JavaScript 7th Edition in the old naming scheme) comes with very few new features. The most important is that JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for 20 years. The operator is **... It will also become much easier to search for data in a JavaScript array with Array.prototype.includes(), but support for async functions (initially announced for ES2016), has been deferred until next year's release. "From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team," reports Softpedia, "since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when the mammoth ES6 release came out last year."

The worst part of being a dev? Working in teams.

And I don't mean that in the "I'm the best ninja code wizard in the whole world and you're all holding me back" kinda way. I'm thinking more in the lines of someone who has to deal with that kind of attitude on a daily basis. As someone who recently was put in a leading position in a dev team, this is by far one of the worst experiences that came with it.

Some examples?
- One dev completely changed the naming scheme for variables in a class he worked on for one. single. bug fix. His reason? He just didn't like it!
- Another one noticed that data he was supplied with was not in the specified format. Instead of flagging this with the project leads, he just rewrote his parser to fit the data. A couple of weeks later the supplier noticed the error, fixed the format and suddenly everyone wondered why the software failed processing the data.
- Or that one senior dev, that just refuses to accept changes because "it was always done like this and it worked" No, it didn't. That's why it was changed!

Once a dev team reaches a certain size, people need to realize that stuff like coding rules and process guidelines are not there to annoy them but to help the whole team work as efficient as possible. I don't care how good a programmer you are, if you can't check your ego you don't belong in any kind of team-oriented development project!

Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).

My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.

5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.

Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.

Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.

On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb

Long time ago I worked with a few developers on some relatively simple web project. We were using php and smarty and we used svn for versioning. At one point some dude joined the project as a php developer (with a few years of experience).

After a few days without any commits, we found out that he doesn't know what a SVN is or how to use it. After he learned how to use it we found out in our repo bunch of files with a following naming scheme:

filename.php
filename_1.php
filename_2.php
filename_3.php
filename_4.php
filename_5.php

longer rant, with curious question at the end;

my sister asked me lately how she can change the way her phone creates the name of pictures she takes (the naming scheme), as she didn't want the name to be composed of date and time (and so on) the picture was taken, cause she had to send it to her boss
after i replied that i don't know how this could be changed and that the naming scheme would have a purpose, she got angry at me because i wouldn't help her and that i should fuckin tell where it can be changed!😡
after i repeated my answer she said "what are you studying cs for?? YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!!!😡😤"
i got furious, you guys can probably imagine as IT guy/dev 😠😠😠, given stereotypes/prejudices etc., unfortunately i'm not the guy who is good at freaking out and yelling at people, but GODDAMN IF I COULD TELL HER WHAT STUDYING THE DEGREE IS REALLY ABOUT! I'M SO FED UP WITH THIS!😤😤😤
i'm not supposed to know how her FUCKIN HONOR PHONE WORKS
WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE and never even thought about changing the naming scheme.
JUST RENAME IT AFTERWARDS!
of course her phone is so complicated that she doesn't even know how to rename the file, as she only knows how to use the google photos app (which doesn't support that?🤔) and never even considered to use the file manager ... well can't blame her for that, android isn't as simple as windows when it comes to this🤷
... in the end she just sent it, as is😪.

oh and by the way, is it actually possible?🤔

Angular 5 was just released! *Yay*

on a completely unrelated note: does anyone get the versioning/naming scheme of angular?

What is a cool naming scheme for the servers
for example we have 6 environments for the QC to run their tests, what would be a cool way to name them

I thought of bugs names,since we are a bug reporting company

what do you think guys

Man, I love Postgres, but one thing I hate about it is its naming scheme.

As far as I know, there is... None.

So I'm always left wondering how certain configuration directives referring to Postgres will be written down as.

Pick your favorite:
Postgres
PostgreSQL
Psql
PgSQL

And maybe more...

Or is there a naming scheme / system I'm not aware of?

> Be me
> Fresh out of school
> Do some volunteer work for 1 year before starting to work
> Start work at local hospital
> One day get assigned new task
> "We have this directory where there is a file for every employee who has a key - File contains legal stuff"
> Current naming scheme "MaxMustermann"
> Desired naming scheme "Max Mustermann"
> Task: rename every file.
> 1974 Files
> OHNONONONO.JPG
> Hol up buddy
> A repetetive automatable task?
> I know this
> Im a hackerman
> Let's write a script....

> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "Python"
> No results

> I could have guessed that

> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "Java"
> No Java compiler

> OH no

> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "Powershell"
> "tHe eXEcUTIon oF poWeRsheLL sCriPts Is dIsAbLeD"

> REEEEEEEE

> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "cmd"
> "YOu dO noT haAV thE rEqUiReD peRmIsSionS To oPeN tHis proGrAm"

> DAFUQ

> Wait this is windows.
> Windows ships with .NET

> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "csc"
> No results

> OHHELLONO.gif

> mfw I have to rename 1794 files by hand.

( Please send help )

It looks like Microsoft are back to their old tricks, specifically the DirectX 9 naming scheme. Naming releases after Northern Hemisphere seasons and repeating words never gets old and/or confusing!

Who's looking forward the "Winter (2018) Creator's Update"?

Dynamics CRM has the most confusing naming scheme for pretty much everything

Hello fellow devranters,
I never thought I'd make a post like this but I need your help/opinion.

My thesis work is about to get published, I worked on a C++ software that solves what we call equivalent reactor network models (basically, different ideal chemical reactors interconnected in various ways). This extends an ecosystem in my research group that is OpenSMOKE, and every collateral applications usually follows a xxxSMOKE naming scheme.

I came up with NodusSMOKE (Nodus is Latin for fishing net) first but it doesn't feel right. Other names I came up with are LinkSMOKE or NetworkSMOKE.

I believe here I might find people who are much more creative than me. I kindly ask your help my dudes.

TIL that Debian package names are not allowed to have underscores in their names. Toast my tomatoes. As if file name conventions, like discouraging colons, would not be enough, you just added another useless bit of entropy to all the clusterfuck information just because you established a naming scheme yourself where you delimited the versions and date with an underscore from the package name.