- Sleep 7h+ each night (you think you don't need it - but you do!)
- drink NO coffee (you've slept enough!)
- pair-up (you're not as good as you think)
- get a grasp on the problem (it's time will spent!)
- communicate constantly (you're not alonw especially)
- refactor just as much
- learn from you partner
- celebrate even small accomplishments (you need success!)
- go home and do something else (your pet project does not need more than 5hrs per week!)
- repeat (because repetition makes perfection!)

Omfg this fucking guy!!!!

Context:

We are going through a major refactor of some of our backend components. I was tasked with cleaning up our ML code while another guy was tasked with cleaning up the general CRUD side of the backend, let's call him DA for "dumb ass".

** At 11pm
DA: I am getting a strange error from your backend. Look:

"Invalid call: method=PUT expected=[POST]"

Me: you need to send a post request not a put request

DM: no, it's not that. I am sending the right thing

Me: ... Let me see...

* 15min ish of testing *

No, it works fine on my version, 1.1.0 what's your version?

DM: I'm on 1.1.0.

Me: send me code?

DM: *send

"request.put(..."

Me: you are sending a PUT... It's literally in the screenshot. Send a Post

DM: I am

Me: no, send a Post

DM: I don't understand, I am sending the request

Me: it's a post not a put

DM: but...

Me: it's a post not a put
Me: good night!!!!!!

Dev: boss, there are some abnormalities and confusion in the client's specifications.

Boss: So?

Dev: Shouldn't we get clear about them and then start coding?

Boss: No need. We assume and code. Then show them to our clients and then ask for their opinions. We will change again according to their opinion.

Dev: ..

A few months later....

Dev: *seeing so many specifications change and realizing now have to refactor a lot of codes* , FML.

"Can you work on this ticket? It's kind of urgent."

-- "OK"

"And could you please not refactor? Just get this done."

-- "Why? What's the issue?"

"The logic is complex. We should not break it."

-- "Erm, that's what the tests are for. So yes, if the need arises, I'll refactor. The tests are my guidelines if the logic breaks or not."

There's a reason we create tests. So let's not hinder code base improvements by some random fear that stuff might break.

If breaks due to refactoring, we'll fix it by adding a valid test case during and then fixing the bug.

If my refactoring does not break the tests, I'll assume the code base is stable.

If your code is untested, then we have a complete different problem.

At the data restaurant:
Chef: Our freezer is broken and our pots and pans are rusty. We need to refactor our kitchen.
Manager: Bring me a detailed plan on why we need each equipment, what can we do with each, three price estimates for each item from different vendors, a business case for the technical activities required and an extremely detailed timeline. Oh, and do not stop doing your job while doing all this paperwork.
Chef: ...
Boss: ...

Some time later a customer gets to the restaurant.
Waiter: This VIP wants a burguer.
Boss: Go make the burger!
Chef: Our frying pan is rusty and we do not have most of the ingredients. I told you we need to refactor our kitchen. And that I cannot work while doing that mountain of paperwork you wanted!
Boss: Let's do it like this, fix the tech mumbo jumbo just enough to make this VIP's burguer. Then we can talk about the rest.

The chef then runs to the grocery store and back and prepares to make a health hazard hurried burguer with a rusty pan.
Waiter: We got six more clients waiting.
Boss: They are hungry! Stop whatever useless nonsense you were doing and cook their requests!
Cook: Stop cooking the order of the client who got here first?
Boss: The others are urgent!
Cook: This one had said so as well, but fine. What do they want?
Waiter: Two more burgers, a new kind of modern gaseous dessert, two whole chickens and an eleven seat sofa.
Chef: Why would they even ask for a sofa?!? We are a restaurant!
Boss: They don't care about your Linux techno bullshit! They just want their orders!
Cook: Their orders make no sense!
Boss: You know nothing about the client's needs!
Cook: ...
Boss: ...

That is how I feel every time I have to deal with a boss who can't tell a PostgreSQL database from a robots.txt file.
Or everytime someone assumes we have a pristine SQL table with every single column imaginable.
Or that a couple hundred terabytes of cold storage data must be scanned entirely in a fraction of a second on a shoestring budget.
Or that years of never stored historical data can be retrieved from the limbo.
Or when I'm told that refactoring has no ROI.
Fuck data stack cluelessness.
Fuck clients that lack of basic logical skills.

Boss: Have you finished that feature?
Me: Almost there, i'm refactoring some classes...
Boss: What? Refactor? But thisnis a new feature, it does not need refactor! We don't have time for this!
Me: 😵🔫

This is what happen when you care about code quality.

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

Ok so the good news is. My vacation is in 2 weeks. And also just got Hired, and handed a big project with big money

The bad news is They need to refactor and document their legacy code from last dev partner. And this is the commit history

OH MY FUCKING GOD KILL ME NOW!

What the fuck has one of my clients been up to?! Every request he makes he suggests we might want to do it via a function.

"We need to ensure this is password protected. Maybe wrap the calls in a function."

I wander if he goes into the bakery and says, "I need a loaf of bread---use flour."

All I can think of is that someone influential in his life is an FP zealot and he's latched onto this word.

But, I quite like FP. Maybe I'll refactor everything to static classes to meet the requirement.

Hope to Christ he doesn't find out about HTML, etc. "Maybe add a CSS rule."

After completing my sprint and some lingering stuff in the backlog

Me: Hey, there's this tiny feature people have really requested, I'll go build it since I got nothing else to do at the moment. It'll only take like 1h

PO: Hmm ok. Don't work on that yet, we need to check with business people and agree on the user stories and bla bla bla

Me: Ok, well there's these bugs I can take care of then, I'll get them fixed, won't be long.

PO: Hmmm, we need to measure the impact first. Let me get back to you on that a bit later

Me: Meh, oh. I'll refactor this bad component meanwhile then.

PO: Have you created a story for that in JIRA? Create the story first and then we'll groom it and take it in when we've time

Me in my head: Dafuq! Im trying to work on your fucking project but you keep throwing all that business bueraucracy shit at me. What am I supposed to do then? Sip coffee in the kitchen and talk about the other fucking billion failed "new business opportunities" with my peers? Fuck this circle jerk of a billion management people all trying to make themselves important. Nothing. Ever. Gets. Fucking. Done!!!

Me: Ah right, I'll do that *proceeds to the water cooler*

So a company I'm working at has this internal product. I just got employed and was put into that team.

"First task: refactor some of the code"

Alright, I start refactoring. Oh I may need to write a small class for this one. And then rewrite this a bit. And then rewrite that a bit. And then rewrite everything.

"Why are you rewriting most of my code?"

oh i would not have needed to do so if your code was not COMING OUT OF YOUR ASS and if all the teams had FREAKING PROPER API DOCUMENTATION

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

You know you learned a lot in the last year when you try to change something on a website you made 1 year ago and it is almost impossible.

The code is not well structured. PHP mixed with HTML, functions that should be organized as a class etc.

I really, really, need to refactor the entire site!

I hate working with egoistic noobshit hotshot "developers". But sadly, they tend to get ahead because they talk like they know everything in front of tech idiot management.

***

management: I need this swanky feature X in our product within the month.

me: That literally requires a huge refactor because our current codebase was never meant to support this type of service. We need to think about this.

noobshit: I disagree. This is easy. We're already doing something similar that is Z, this shouldn't take very long.

me: Z seems similar, but it actually quite different.

me (in my head): ... and you would know it's *completely* different if you fucking understood our own codebase vs what X needs you moron.

noobshit: Nah, it's similar. We can accomplish X if we polish up Z a bit.

*** 1 week later ***

noobshit: Omg X is horrifying and complex. We can't do it without a huge refactor.

me: yes

me (in my head): Fuck you

***

But guess who's got better career prospects because they're all shiny and positive in front of management?

!rant
Just started working for a new company. Super cool. Just like the last one (as far as perks), except they actually trust their devs.

Old company: Make sure your code is extensible
Devs at old company: You know it's not written in stone right?
Old company: Does that mean you can make it do this?
Devs at old company: No. That's the wrong code base

New company: I need a feature. Get it done when you can
New company devs: Well, guess I'll take some time to refactor all this stuff while I'm at it
~Some time later~
New company: Thanks, that feature works great!

No staring over shoulders, asking when it will be done. No asking why we want to refactor something. As long as work continues to flow, there are no issues. It's great!

Also, if we want to try a new tech, we just have to put together a short paper explaining why it will work better in that situation than the tech that's already in place.

Programmer: We really have to refactor the codebase!

Director: That's not important. Do you think our customer would care what it looks like under the hood if we are selling cars?

One year after...

VP: We need to build a new platform for flexibility!

Director: Let's rewrite!

I honestly don’t know how my coworker has been a software engineer for 10+ years, doesn’t know and or understand a single Linux command, only works from windows... also doesn’t understand the concept of proper version control ... thinks zip folders is completely sufficient... AND doesn’t understand why someone would need to refactor something... says it works... I’m like you have a 2000 line function... yes it works, but it’s not testable nor reusable... he says he’s tested it (at his desk) ... and so what if it’s not reuseable... he’ll copy and paste and rewrite something for another project. “That’s what we are paid todo” .... HORSESHIT!!!

I don’t understand how the system hasn’t weeded people out like this.... and he blindly doesn’t want to take criticism, or learn.. saying his Years of experience proves he knows what he’s doing... bullshit

I’m just happy management is on my side.

Wrote a feature that took a week plus to complete that was reviewed, approved, merged and already in production.

Guy who approved comes in and says to make changes now with 1 day to end of sprint saying to refactor stuff. It won't make a difference other than some logging changes but I found the effort to be large plus the QA would need to retest everything.

When I brought up my concern, he tells me it is very easy and to get it done.

Now am feeling so stuck rushing on this work cos he called it 'easy' and I don't want to look like a fool...

Why review and approve code only to come back last minute asking for changes.. Not the first time and always last minute followed by calling it easy. I am almost forming a phobia to merge approved code..

Some people refactor because feature updates need to be optimized throughout the code base.

I refactor because I am terrible at planning.

Today we'll refactor the API.
Tomorrow we'll celebrate.

My Future Self need never know how bad it once was.

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

Quick backstory. I've negotiated with our customers to drop IE11 support (happiest day of my life) and decided to also refactor and update our webpack configuration. I asked a bunch of questions about a few exclusions we had for JS processing and received a reply of: I don't know if we need these anymore. Queue a snippet of my response in a meme format on how I wish to proceed with the change done by our tech lead.

I got a project to "refactor" some shitty site. It was written in nativ php. The guy who wrote this is a moron.
The site is so unsecure that my dog could broke into it while barking at cats.

It's sooo unreadable and illogical.
Every time i look at the code i get sadder and sadder. And now i understand why so many people hate php..

**Jump in time**
After i planned the new logic. My boss told me i can't do any of this. Because they only need a new user lever..
Now i just stare at this pile of horse sh*t and rant about it.

ask about his game code logic he will rage, ask about how his front end code doing he will rage, talk to him about my server so that his front end code can follow he will rage.. and the end of final project which I merge my code and his code (I need to refactor nearly everything) he said you are very hard communicate. _. fml

If everything goes like the usual, my Valentine date will be a bunch of old code I need to refactor

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

Typescript seems like such overkill, but then you need to refactor your code and hit a bunch of issues in production. I don't think I'll ever go without typescript again. Fuck dynamic typing, it doesn't scale

I just found a 980 line long method in one of our legacy code bases.... And I need to add to it. There are no unit tests and I desperately want to refactor that shit....

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

Note to self: if you have a tight deadline and need to rush a website / web app, use SASS because you're going to end up with 800+ lines of CSS because you suck at your job and you keep telling yourself you'll refactor everything but never get around it.

Don't you just love customers?

It al began when they showed us the flyers they were printing for their new products, an some one at our company who doesn't work here anymore had the brilliant idea of copying it to their webshop, as a fucking gimmick... Ooohh man the customer didn't seem to understand it was only visually

They wanted the 3d layering effect to be dynamic, so each product would have its own with custom colours

So it was made

A few weeks later they didn't want the informational text, they wanted links to each product that the layer uses

Sounded like logical so it was made

Again some time later, they noticed that the layers were not textured, but just plain

I argued against it because it would add unnecessary loading time for some 300 by 400 px element but they insisted

So they got what they wanted

A few days later they said that the textures were of low quality, and that we had to create ones with higher quality

Again our management said, yes

We made ~ twice the size of the element in image pixels to create a higher definition image

Then the customer wanted that the layers should change based on some selection menu above it

(At this point we realized that it would no longer be just a fun little gimmick)

So we tried to refactor/rebuild it to remove most if not all the hacks we did just to make the customer happy, that took too long for them (the customer) so we had to revert back to the hacked together version because otherwise we would not be done on time (commanded by management)

But again, we ... I say 'we' as in the company but realistically I've been the only one who has worked on the fucking abomination

But I digress...

A few stupid requests later, some layer images are almost fully transparent PNG images that are almost 1mb in Filesize each (some products have 5 or even more layers) and the god damn thing now has to account for optional layers...

I AM FUCKING SPENT... I'VE JUST CAME BACK FROM VACATION BUT I ALREADY NEED IT AGAIN... FUCKING WORKING 60 HOURS A WEEK JUST TO KEEP ONE CUSTOMER HAPPY WHILE OTHER PROJECTS BREATH ON MY NECK

"The MVC framework is just a hype, we dont need to refactor our ASP.NET webshop" - former CTO

Dudeee, its a pattern not a framework, ever heard of 'single responsibily' instead of these monolithic 8000 line helper classes!

I hope one day i will stop writing dirty code to achieve a task, forget to refactor it and then struggle to use correct names for variables and methods when i need to move on other tasks.

Took over a NodeJS/SailsJS project from a previous developer that is no longer working at the company. There's no documentation or requirement docs and the models need to be rewritten as some have up to 67 attributes in them.

Looked through the source code file by file to see how bad it was and it will more than likely be easier to start over then to try and refactor and cleanup the existing project into a usable state.

As bonus, I was given the option to switch the entire stack if needed as well.

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

I love git stash.

It's helps a lot for doing refactors to me. I guess it's not the most complex workflow, but it wasn't obvious to me when I started with git. Let me explain.

Refactors. As you start writing the first lines of a refactor, you start to notice something: you're changing too many things, your next commit is going to be huge.

That tends to be the very nature of refactors, they usually affect different parts of code.

So, there you are, with a shitload changes, and you figure "hey, I have a better idea, let me first do a smaller cohesive commit (let's call it subcommit) that changes a smaller specific thing, and then I'll continue with the upper parts of the refactor".

Good idea, but you have a shitload of changes nearly touching every file in your working copy, what do you do with these changes? You git stash them.

Let's say you stash and try to do that smaller "subcommit". What sometimes happens to me at this point is that I notice that I could do an even smaller change inside this current "subcommit". So I do the same thing, I git stash and I work on that even smaller thing.

At some point I end up `git stash pop`ing up all these levels. And it it shows that git stash is powerful for this.

* You never lose a single bit of work you did.
* Every commit is clean.
* After every commit you can run tests (automated or manual) to see shit is still working.
* If you don't like some changes that you had git stashed, you can just erase them with git reset --hard.
* If a change overlaps between a stash you're applying and the last "subcommit", then
if they differ, git shows conflicts on the files,
if they are identical, nothing happens.

with this workflow things just flow and you don't need to wipe out all your changes when doing simpler things,
and you don't need to go around creating new branches with temp commits (which results in bloated temp commits and the work of switching branches).

After you finish the refactor, you can decide to squash things with git rebase.

(Note: I don't use git stash pop, because it annoys the fuck out of me when I pop and you I get conflicts, I rather apply and drop)

From the book

Refactoring JavaScript
Turning Bad Code into Good Code
Evan Burchard

HOW CONVERSATIONS ABOUT REFACTORING SHOULD GO UNTIL TESTS ARE WRITTEN
“I refactored login to take email address and username.” “No, you didn’t.”
“I’m refactoring the code to ____”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Before we can add tests, we need to refactor.” “No.”
“Refactoring th–”
“No.”
“Refa–” “No.”

Had a call with my line manager today about extending a deadline to the end of the year. Given the work needed it’s a given as I’m having to pretty much refactor an entire app, plus I also suggested that I train the new guy to give him some experience as I have training and tutoring experience.

It’s the first time I’ve gone “Here’s what I want and here’s what I need for this to work” and it went smoothly.

Great day.

!rant

Guys, Im curious, what you would say about situation if you are in need of some quite simple tool and you write it but becouse you need it today, not tommorow, you just dont give a heck about all the fancy stuff and (lets say for php) you start to write all in 2-3 files like you was back beginner?

Or you just nope out of situation?
Do you refactor that when you bored just becouse this cant be on my disk, noone can see this abomination?
Or you delete after usage (only to relaize 5 minutes latter you need it back :P )

Im curious your opinion.

PS.
nope, if you came to bitch about any of opinions even opinion "well, i wouldnt give a fuck and just not do it", go away and get lost.

E: typo

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

Coding distraction
To be honest - task distraction

1. Starting a task, you need to do
2. finding old code you want to refactor
2. Doing some improvements
3.Fixing the bugs created by prev actions
....
Task not finished
But that's kind of fun. Livin' on the edge

I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm

There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.

Real story:
Started fixing one file in one repo, build, doesn't build, go into other repo fix just one file there, but first I need to make myself a toolchain, making of toolchain fails because it depends on some dirty fix in the file I was fixing, refactor and clean that to a proper state, fuck yeah toolchain builds, source toolchain run make now, breaks with undefined reference, no time to debug plus fuck this automake, remove it, make a makefile, builds fuck yeah, shit now unittest are failing because why not, refactored that makefile as well, everything compiles, automate the test fully so that they are ran on the target out of make just because I'm a nice guy, fuck yeah everything works, commit this repo, commit other repo, review time, one of the guys gave up, the other one did it properly, found some shit there, fix that, done, merge, triggers CI fucking pass

All of this was done in 3h, Talk about efficiency

Have you ever gotten a task where you have to modify some existing code, and to get it to work the way it needs to you have to write some ugly ass code?

And I'm talking FUGLY ass code. The kind where every brain cell you have screams to refactor it all so that your code won't be so ugly and you can live with yourself. But you only wrote it that way because some numbnuts who was fired a year ago designed it that way, and left zero commentary or documentation on his reasoning ("sELf-dOcUmeNtiNg cOde, bRuH!").

It doesn't pose any sort of risk with regards to security or resource management or efficiency, or really even faulty logic. It just looks fucking awful, my brain can instantly see better ways to design it and I don't want history to tie my name to it.

But also the system is being gutted and retired within a matter of months, so maintenance won't even be a concern; and you know that you have a lot of other large tasks that need your attention too, and to refactor will ultimately prove to be a time sink.

I mean ultimately, I know what I need to do, but I guess it's a pride thing. Just makes me feel icky.

Me : So cool ! My new graphQL APIs are working so good !
Also me : ‘order by <text field> take 50 skip 10000’
Me : Hmmmm.. 2.3 SEDCONDS ?! WTF. Let’s add an index !
SQL : Sorry bro, can’t add index on nvrachar(max).
Me: OK. Here you go, you are nvrachar(128) now. Add my index !
SQL : Ok
GraphQl :<same query > Here : 90 milliseconds
Me : ‘order by <text field> desc take 50 skip 10000’
GraphQL : Sorry bro : 3 seconds. (Yes, slower than without any index)
Me : Do I fu7cking need to manually add ASC and DESC indexes ? WTF IS GOING ON !
I should’ve learnt a bit more about databases. ☹. And now I don’t have time to refactor a prod database as “needed” .
/me needs to buy DB audit. Company is still a bit small to have a DBA full time.

I realized something. No matter what tech i use to code a project there will always be a dev to take a shit on it

someone will recommend to use redis, after i use redis some other dev will trash me for having such a poor choice and recommend me socket.io

Then if i use socket.io some 3rd dev will trash me cause thats not the right way of building stuff and recommend me kafka

If i use kafka some 4th dev will trash me and say why i dont use angular

If I use angular 5th dev will trash me for not using react

If i use react 6th dev will trash me for not using nextjs

Tired of this bullshit

I'll use whatever tech i need. If i dont know what to use ill ask and take the first suggestion. I'll just build a saas and when it starts earning money ill pay other devs to refactor and scale the hell hole (which wont be cause i write good code following solid principles and not spaghetti). Much simpler solution than wrecking my head with decisions of tech stack

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

I'm going to confess: I am the type of developer that creates the ExcruciatinglyLongAndSpecificClassNameObject with the UtterlyDetailedExplanationMethod. It's just a thing I keep doing, despite voiced frustrations from people I've worked with. It just feels right in the mindset of self-documenting code

And while I acknowledge this isn't a flawless process, I see no other way around without losing information. I've tried alternatives, but everything feels like trading one issue for another:

- Abbreviations work as long as they are well known (XML, HTML, ...). As soon as you add your own (even if they make sense in the business context) you can bet your ass someone is going to have no idea what you're talking about. Even remembering your own shit is difficult after X months.

- Removing redundant naming seems fine until it isn't redundant anymore (like when a feature with similar traits gets added). and you can bet your ass no-one is going to refactor the existing part to specify how it differs from the newly added stuff.

- Moving details to namespaces is IMO just moving the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. Also have had folks that just auto-include namespaces in VS without looking if they need the class from namespaceA or namespaceB and then proceed to complain why it doesn't compile.

So, since I am out of ideas, I'd like to ask you folks: Is it possible to reduce class/method name lengths without losing information? Or is self-documenting code just an ideal I'm trying too hard to achieve? Or are long names not a problem at all? I'm looking forward to your answers.

On the kernel/os project I'm working on with @SoldierOfCode.
It's a side project but I *need* to refactor the normal text based functions to vga graphics compatibility.

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

#Story time.
Been working on a project for 2 months with Colleague "Jim" doing the code reviews. Project is finished in a stable form and can be extended if needed. Then my other colleague/boss "Mo" decided that we need to do a refactor. Fast forward a bit and the conclusion is "Mo" and "Jim" are going to discuss every step with me. And we started a new project that should do the same as the project I just finished

Here some facts:
Every day a meeting/ code review / discussion.
Decisions they make I do not agree with.
I need to redo my work multiple times.

Now this does make me look like a toddler that needs supervision which is not the case.
They want something future proof and something that fits his new coding standard "Mo". and certain things I do agree with and is clearly the better architecture. however somethings are just stupid, time wasting, making it worse. I'm getting so frustrated by the fact that billion dollar companies have clear coding standards that work. and are correct. and this company decided to do their own thing of stupid rules!

- shorten variables
- Keep lines under 90char
- put multiple things in 1 file
- Keep function names short
and many more of removing stuff and let you guess stuff..

I just... *sigh* get so tired of this shit.

*names are randomly chosen

What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?

I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.

An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.

On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.

Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.

Need to refactor the code base, and when looked at it, we don't have single UnitTest.... F*** them all

I hate working with sh*tty Devs

I used that term specifically.. No it's not about juniors, it's about those who pretend to be seniors.
In a major company project, one of us has to take a week or two to refactor that one "senior" dev work. When tested it performs poorly, when checked, it violates every SE principle and the business people are wondering why we keep seeing `refactoring User Stories/Tasks` and why we still don't have a working project yet. Yes, we will never have, that mess that `senior` dev created is almost impossible to refactor without major rework.
Now, major rework coming, we need to give something to that Senior so he doesn't feel left behind. Argue to never let him get anything in core or this company will go under...

In short, I hate working with sh*tty devs.

Do you plan the application, on which you will be working, before you actually begin to write code?

I do web development and usually begin with something rough or look at designs of other developers. Like an dashboard example, when I see an image on google search that I like, I try to make something simmilar and when I have the surface I can add the functionality and improve the design.

Sometimes I have to make changes in half of the development because at the beginning there was no assumption that there will be a need for a certain functionality or I change a implemented feature to work properly, so I have to refactor something I made as a ground on which other parts will rely, although if I had planed the application in detail, maybe it wouldn't come to such refactoring.

In school we did prototypes, used to draw flowcharts and hold on a precedence diagrams that we made, but now at work when I receive an projekt I just begin to code :-D maybe this should change, how do you do it? If you plan your project, how do you do it?

got back from a week long (mountain/snowboard) trip, disconnected from anything that means work, just to found out the team decided to do a huge refactor of the whole app! now i have to 2x work to catch up. i need another vacation 😩!

ps: at least they were nice enough to not break me the news while i was gone and enjoy my time 😅

How do you switch from testing while debugging (functional) to TDD unit tests?

Usually I test while coding by just running the use case and making sure while coding, bad inputs are caught/handled.

But most times I start with a general idea of the structure and what the about should be (which essentially would be the functional test case?)

I don't think about how you can break each part or the functions I need until I need them. Then usually start simple and then refactor. And until I'm sure each time I refactor would require changing the tests?

I need advice fellow developers, am I stubborn?

So I lost an argument in my team regarding constant vs variable directly in a method for stored procedure names.

I separated names of procedures into their own StoredProcedureConstants file because it makes it very easy to see all procedures used in a project and refactor their names if necessary. Argument against was that you loose time creating a constant. Am I silly if I am alergic to seeing quotation marks stuff without its designated purpose throughout the code?
Their way is adding var procedureName = "cc.storeProcedureName" directly in a method. I just can't find my peace with it. To me this is a magic string.

Am I being unreasonable?

I go to add a method call in a business logic class that's used exclusively in a particular service, and get blocked in the PR by some other guy-

Other Guy: refactor this into the shared framework referenced by all our microservices

Me: it is only and would only be used in this service

OG: what about the other business logic class in this service?

Me: it's not used there, and if it does end up used there then we can refactor it into a class that they both reference then

OG: I need to know when the abstraction of this function will be done. is it going to be delivered next sprint?

Me: YAGNI - better to avoid doing extra work when we don't know if we'll even need it

OG: tbh you can still abstract it with some generics and lambda magic, but im not gonna enforce that

Me: premature abstraction is the root of all evil (tongueout)

OG: not really, its the root of not having a million miles of tech debt in 2 years

I just can't win for losing with the anti-YAGNI yogi.

Alright, I need an advice.

I have legacy Angular client. It’s impossible to refactor it. The only real option is to rewrite everything from scratch, however, while the team does it, it needs to be accessible to our clients.

The approach I am thinking of is making micro-frontends out of original client and rewriting each of them (in React, Vue, don’t know yet.)

Anyone has experience with that? I would appreciate any advice or suggestion.

trying to refactor some code to implement a issue/feature on a ticket:

try option A. .... 2 hours later hit a Dead end.

try option B .... 1 day later.. another dead end.

try option B.2f ... I want to give up... wasting all my time...

Not sure what I'm suppose to do anymore..
It feels chaotic and dirty hacking to make it work.. and even now. I cannot get it to compile...

Only solution looks like Copy and paste a couple of classes and change one single variable. with huge preprocessor #if around them.

I need to take a shower I feel dirty now...

I thought my code was bad and that was why it was taking twice as long as any other group to run

No it’s just Illinois the state my group was assigned has almost 2000 more data rows to scrape compared to any other group. My code wasn’t running slow. It just had longer to run

I’ve spent 4 days trying to fucking refactor and improve my code Ignoring clean code and attempting clever code to run faster and now I need to revert back to clean code since no one else in my group would be able to understand or work on the damn file if I left it at clever

Fucking hell 😫

Coworker: "Hey, so I discovered this library that automatically brings up and tears down local containers to perform unit tests on data sources"

Me: "Sounds neat"

Coworker: "Yeah, I've been messing with it locally, and it means we don't need to have the data sources installed on our machines or rely on the ones in the testing environment."

Me: "That's good"

Coworker: "Just a shame I had to roll back our testing framework to a previous version and refactor the code in all our other tests as a result."

Me: "Wait what? *looks at documentation* It says they support the newer framework"

Coworker: "Yeah, but I couldn't get it to work. So I'm just gonna make a PR for it, okay?" *Proceeds to make a PR, approve and merge the code before I can comment further on the changes*

Welp, there goes all my motivation to get anything done for the rest of the day.

So today I learnt that babel/runtime-corejs2 is a lib which makes babel more optimised by refactoring most of its function calls. So I need to import a library..... to gain more performance out of an existing library.... I mean you could literally refactor babel instead of asking people to import another package in your project 🤦‍♂️

c3tools
I want to finish it so badly. I have everything I just need time.
JJittai
Every time I see the code I wanna dance. I want to work on that so much but I haven't in a long time, I want to refactor everything (I've changed a lot in that time), it will be so delicious.

If you are curious about them you can see them in my github account.

And of course the rest but with these I'd be so satisfied.

As an android dev when I inherited a shitty project thats when I realized what really means to write readable and most importantly testable code. Codebase I inherited wasnt even really that bad it was quite readable, but boy it was not suited for any unit/instrumented tests. im talking spaghetti code.

Nowadays I refactor apps to make sure they are testable instead of spending weeks writing tests for a shitty codebase which was done without thinking about separation of concerns. Clients hate the extra couple weeks on top of request but what can I do, if they want tests they need to work with TDD approach or give extra time for refactors.

I need to go buy a rubber duck so it looks less like I'm talking to myself. Trying to pull out and refactor some shit functionality in a WordPress theme because the client NEEDS it. Frankly all it is doing is creating a custom post type, but they're used to the way they've been doing it and I'm stuck with dealing with it. I generally like this part of my job (my face in the code) but trying to read this huge mess of code with no standards is driving me insane.

"What in the hell are you doing here?" "Why do we have variables for $thedata, $the_data, and $theData?"
"Why are your brackets on the wrong line sometimes?"
"Why is each line in this function enclosed in it's own PHP tags rather than around the function?"

At least if I had a duck I could say I'm talking to him.

"We need to refactor THIS section of the Frontend because BE wants to implement THAT - we will agree the new structure, and we will migrate the previous structure"

- refactoring the app 4 times a year because reasons

I was planning on migrating my Mastodon instance to a new node, but then I looked carefully at my deployment scripts. I had built in support for multiple servers, but not everything supports it, and the configuration is messy now that I think about it.

Now I need to write a bunch of tests, and then refactor a bunch of my code. Hopefully I can get this done before I run out of space on my Mastodon instance. It's gonna be a fun day. :-P

Writing unit tests for singletons...

I would just want to refactor it so it’d be easier to unit test, but need to write unit tests in order to be allowed to refactor. Geez...

So apparently my code went to prod more or less all right. Phew, the deadline was this week-end. This project have been sitting there for month, they gave me the technical requirement and never bothered to ask the stakeholders about it. When the contract went in, they started to freak out it wasn't usable.

The thing is, this project had way more moving part and trying to threat video in the frontend is not the easiest. But now is REFACTOR TIME.

I dream of getting rid of the browser video api (too flaky), download the bitmap directly and render it in requestAnimationFrame. I call it just-in-time rendering. I think i'd need to put a decoder in aws, I did it already with ffmpeg. I could not manage to put it in streaming mode though, so it was still a bit slow, but i could decode, write and re-encode faster than the video player speed.

What do you lads think? Doable or not? I at least need to general tidy up (this codebase have grown organically without any fucking direction from above, like this project took all my time on the technical side, I did not have time to run after people to get specs), centralizing state, improve monorepo and tooling, perfs,...

Hopefully they understood i cant keep adding whatever feature they want today.

Arrgh...

I need to do a lot of refactoring and testing (%80 percent of which is integration) and ITS SO TEDIOUS!!!

Now, for anyone who says "oh, you write spaghetti code, your code shouldn't be so tedious to refactor". No. It's only tedious because it's a few thousand lines that I've been too lazy to refactor till now, and I need to go through it all.

Anybody have any advice for refactoring or testing in Go?

How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.

For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.

So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.

Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.

Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.

It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.

Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.

But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.

Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.

My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.

My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.

I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.

Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.

I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.

Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.

I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.

It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.