I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.

My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).

Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.

I introduce to you, my team ...

Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.

UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."

Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.

Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.

Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.

Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.

Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.

Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.

The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.

There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.

All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.

I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.

Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?

And yeah, FML.

Please for the love of god name your variables in a sensible way! How the FUCK am I supposed to read your shitcode if you decide to write 6 (!!!) nested loops with variables each named by exactly one character. With no comments whatsoever!

I would rather crack password hashes than this nonsense.

Manager: 'Please remove this checkbox from that page.'

Me: 'Sure thing, it was stupid anyway. Just gimme a couple of minutes.'

Legacy code: 'LOL the checkbox is wired to everything else and if you simply remove it the backend will shit itself. There is several hundred lines of inline Javascript in the HTML template with some Thymeleaf stuff managing the form data or just are there to make the code less readable. The controller for the page is a bit more than a thousand lines of spaghetti, no easy way to find where is that specific data necessary and where can be easily removed. Class variables declared between methods, dozens of nested if statements checking shit in every method and the data is passed through like half a dozen other classes. Good luck with that!'

Me: '💩.'

23 nested If statements....are you fucking kidding me!!

We have a new developer working in our office. He is fairly new, which is understandable, so he asks for help regularly(which I actually appreciate). This time however, he asked for help, and every step of the way argued it. He said he needed help making a small circle(it's just an indicator on a table).

I told him if there is a mat-icon it would be simple, but if not it would still be pretty simple with CSS. He argued that those two options seem messy. I pointed out they are extremely clean actually, and showed him how it was only about 4 lines of css. and 1 if there was a material icon. He agreed it was pretty easy, and then went with a complicated way to have green or red. I let him know that was really trivial, and even gave him the exact code he needed for it(at this point, he could have copy and pasted, adjusted the conditional to the name of his variable, and be done).

He proceeds to take 3 more days to complete this task, making a new component for a colored circle, using templates and nested css in the html, and hard coding the color as opposed to using the material colors we use site wide. All in all 100+ lines of code. And he felt my solution with fewer than 10 lines was messy.

Listen. Use invariants. If you can do

if(!x) {
return foo;
}
...rest of function logic...

Instead of

if(x) {
...some long branch with more tests...
} else {
return foo;
}

Please do. It's so much easier to read when all of your conditions are tested in a line at the top instead of nested 8 layers deep in if-else blocks.

Thanks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

just.
what the crap.

people should keep their mental diarrhea away from their keyboards.

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

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

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

So.
yep.
that's been my week.

...... WHAT A FUCKING BUFFOON!

Most hated language features?

PL/SQL:
• it exists

XSLT:
• it also exists

PHP:
• it still exists.

VB:
• Significant parentheses: `subName` calls the subroutine, and `subName()` calls the subroutine and gets a return value. If you use the wrong invocation, it yells at you. Why!?
• For reasons unknown, you can only have `sleep` appear once per codebase. (So put it in a function!)

Ruby:
• It’s bloody easy to write code with absolute shit performance, and it kind of feels encouraged because of just how easy Ruby makes everything. Less critical thinking means worse performance, and Ruby’s blissful elegance encourages mental laziness.
• Minor: You cannot pass a hash as the first method parameter without enclosing it in parentheses, ex:`method({key: value})`. This is due to the ambiguous case between passing a hash argument and a (curly) block/proc (`method {|args| code}`). This could be remedied pretty easily with a little bit of look ahead.
• Minor: There is no `elsif` for `unless` (a negated if). Why? No reason given.

Python:
• no block endings, so nested code can be extremely difficult to follow.

Bash:
• The freaking syntax oh god why.

All languages:
• rand vs rand() vs Rand vs Rand() vs rnd vs RND vs random() vs random vs randInt() vs Math.random() vs Math.randInt() vs ...

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

You know shit gets serious when you start to comment your nested if/else blocks...

Interviewer: Here is the interview challenge. Tell me what the expected output is. You have 5 minutes.

** 100 line class with 4 async methods that contain if/thens nested 4 layers deep that call each other and log things to the console

Dev: Ok wow this is a bit of a maze to work through but I’ll try my best.

** 1 minute later of reading through the code

Interviewer: One minute has elapsed. There is now 4 minutes remaining.

Dev: Actually could you please not interject with time updates like that while I’m reading code? It makes the challenge harder than necessary. Just letting me know when the time is up would be fine.

Interviewer: Ok.

** ~2 minutes later trying to comb through this spaghetti mess

Interviewer: What do you think are you getting close to figuring it out?

Dev: …

I worked for over 13 hours yesterday on super-urgent projects. I got so much done it's insane.

Projects:
1) the printer auto-configuration script.
2) changing Stripe from test mode to live mode in production
3) website responsiveness

I finished two within five minutes and pushed to both QA and Production. actually urgent, actually necessary. Easy change.

The printer auto-configure script was honestly fun to write, if very involved. However, the APIs I needed to call to fetch data, create a printer client, etc... none of them were tested, and they were _all_ broken in at least two ways. The CTO (api guy in my previous rant) was slow at fixing them, so getting the APIs working took literally four hours. One of them (test print) still doesn't work.

Responsiveness... this was my first time making a website responsive. Ever. Also, one of the pages I needed to style was very complicated (nested fixed-aspect-ratio + flexbox); I ended up duplicating the markup and hacking the styling together just to make it work. The code is horrible. But! "Friday's the day! it's going live and we're pushing traffic to it!" So, I invested a lot of time and energy into making it ready and as pretty as I could, and finally got it working. That page alone took me two hours.

The site and the printer script (and obv the Stripe change as well) absolutely needed to be done by this morning. Super important.

well.

1) Auto-configure script. Ostensibly we would have an intern come in and configure the printers. However, we have no printers that need configuring, so she did marketing instead. :/ Also, the docs Epson sent us only work for the T88V printer (we have exactly one, which we happened to set up and connect to). They do not work for the T88VI printers, which is what we ordered. and all we'll ever be ordering. So. :/ I'll need to rewrite a large chunk of my code to make this work. Joy :/

2) Stripe Live mode. Nobody even seemed to notice that we were collecting info in Test mode, or that I fixed it. so. um. :/

3) Responsiveness.
Well. That deadline is actually next Wednesday. The marketing won't even start until then, and I haven't even been given the final changes yet (like come on). Also! I asked for a QA review last night before I'd push it to production. One person glanced at it. Nobody else cared. Nobody else cared enough to look in the morning, either, so it's still on QA. Super-important deadline indeed. :/

Honestly?

I feel like Alice (from Dilbert) after she worked frantically on urgent projects that ended up just being cancelled. (That one where Wally smells that lovely buttery-popcorn scent of unnecessary work.)

I worked 13 hours yesterday.
for nothing.

fucking. hell.

The nightmare continues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t make this stuff up.

Why is it so important to some people to claim that "HTML and CSS are not programming languages"? I get it, you're a REAL programmer working with arrays, maybe tuples, objects and possibly direct memory management. Who the fuck has a right to call themselves a programmer for writing some brain dead markup or poorly designed selectors, right? Who fucking cares for semantic tags or nested selectors?

Just think for a few seconds about when you were taking your first baby steps to becoming the GOD ROCKING MEMORY HANDLER THAT WRITES _REAL_ CODE that you are today, and how good it felt to be able to create something that appeared on your screen. It felt pretty awesome, yeah?

Now imagine if someone much more experienced than you told you "You're not a real programmer, that is not real programming. You should see what I do, I do real programming".

I think you get it. Why spend your energy spreading bad vibes when you could spend it on something more productive. Like reading up on the new CSS4 specs ;)

1. My senior told me that my code is crashing.

2. I check the code and told him that it is not my doing. As there was lots of nested if-else as I prefer to keep a variable and update it in if conditions. Like a filters rather than trees with branches. What I say, I knew my coding style.

3. Then he show me my git commit and I am having existential crises.

Am I missing days? How can I? I mean was I abducted and in mean time some alien took my place and they placed this memory of me coding?

Ah! man I think I am possessed by some inexperienced developer. I seriously need some fucked up crash to exorcise him.

I have previously seen this in a production code base. The same code base included nested if statements (20+ conditions)...

If (condition == false) {
return false;
} else if (condition == true) {
return true;
}

Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.

It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).

Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.

If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).

So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?

Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.

I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.

Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.

Having to review an offshore C++ codebase made in Romania that the company I worked for they bought to control a wifi module on a complex RF mobile tech device that I can't legally give more details on.

If I could legally post this masterpiece, or should I say masterpiece-of-shit, all of you C++ dev would instantly get AIDS and all the existing types of cancer upon browsing it for 2 minutes.

It's laughably bad and unmaintainable. One of my colleague called it "the perfect example of human obfuscation" and it fits perfectly.

Think of a 100k LoC main function with nested loops and ifs with random sleep values, 1000 values of hardcoded 32 bits arrays declared globally in the first 10k lines for unknown reasons. Comments in Romanian mixed with english. Somehow, this shit works by some miracle.

The worst intern you can think of, while being piss drunk, could do better and it's no joke.

Refactoring nested ifs.
I'm not a pro but I despise working with nested ifs. It's hard to debug and read.

If you cant chunk the if using method, i think you can use ifs like this:
If(){return}
If() {return}

Not like this:
If() {
If() {
If() {
}
}
}
😠😠😤🙅😢

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

I used a goto. Couldn't figure out how to solve it with loops, due to nested switch, if, for..

Dev: Ok refactor this following block of code to make it more readable/maintainable while still ensuring the tests pass

*** Block is an absolute mess of nested ternaries, poorly named functions, single letter variables and outdated comments. An underhand pitch if there ever was one ***

Interview Candidate: Why would you refactor code if the tests are already passing?

Dev: …… NEXT.

I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.

I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?

Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!

I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.

The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.

The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.

All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.

The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.

Fucking dead end.

And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.

Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.

Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?

And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.

And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Basically: Shoutout to my dad!

My dad's not an engineer or anything. But he likes building PCs and has a bunch of tech at home.

Well, thanks to him, I had a PC very early on, and of course, I did the typical skiddie stuff it, aka "fake batch virus haha funny" and playing Minecraft.

Well, at some point, after tinkering with mods to enhance the quality of gameplay, I found the ultimate mod: Macro / Keybind Mod.
This mod allows you to bind stuff to keybinds, such as commands or chat messages, or... Macros.

This mod has a custom macro language. (Hint: This is where the fun begins)

Another mod I used was AutoSwitch. However, that mod required a "core mod" (aka library installed in a dumb way). I thought, "why do I install 2 mods to get 1 thing? dumb", and made an ugly macro with lots of nested if-elses, which perfectly emulated AutoSwitch behavior for the Minecraft version I was on.

Yup, I basically got rid of 2 jar files in my mods folder by making my own ugly macro.

The fact that I recreated something in an obscure language, having not even coded any program before, made me grow interest into actual programming languages.

Me: yo DEV2 parse this string into a hashmap. Use regex, 2 rows of code are enough for the job
DEV2: implemented 40 rows of switch/if cases into nested for loop.

Please kill me 🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫🇮🇹

This is kinda the silliest thing ever but...

In a class with a computer lab, one of the other people who uses the same desktop as me started taking screenshots at exactly 1:11. I followed suit and started taking screenshots at 11:11. I still have no idea who they are...

Now is almost the end of the year, and I really want to know who they are if only for the satisfaction, so I was thinking and came up with a solution that would take minimal social interaction. I wrote a Python script to take a screenshot every eight seconds and hid it on the computer, running. It saves the screenshots to a folder that is nested in another one, so the likelihood of someone finding out about this is pretty low. So anyways next class day I'm going to sift through the screenshots and find out who this is and probably some stuff about them given that I get to see over an hour of their computer activity. Fun stuff!

TL;DR I'm using Python to stalk kids at my school...

first real program was an 8x8 maze game on my ti-83+ calculator. wrote all as nested ifs, and if you took one wrong turn it'd run out of memory

I never thought clean architecture concepts and low complicity, maintainable, readable, robust style of software was going to be such a difficult concept to get across seasoned engineers on my team... You’d think they would understand how their current style isn’t portable, nor reusable, and a pain in the ass to maintain. Compared to what I was proposing.

I even walked them thru one of projects I rewrote.. and the biggest complaint was too many files to maintain.. coming from the guy who literally puts everything in main.c and almost the entire application in the main function....

Arguing with me telling me “main is the application... it’s where all the application code goes... if you don’t put your entire application in main.. then you are doing it wrong.. wtf else would main be for then..”....

Dude ... main is just the default entry point from the linker/startup assembly file... fucken name it bananas it will still work.. it’s just a god damn entry point.

Trying to reiterate to him to stop arrow head programming / enormous nested ifs is unacceptable...

Also trying to explain to him, his code is a good “get it working” first draft system.... but for production it should be refactored for maintainability.

Uggghhhh these “veteran” engineers think because nobody has challenged their ways their style is they proper style.... and don’t understand how their code doesn’t meet certain audit-able standards .

You’d also think the resent software audit would have shed some light..... noooo to them the auditor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” ... BULLSHIT!

When the fuck will people learn to handle errors as soon as possible and return early? I have been reading the some code all day and the amount of nested:
```
if(okay) {
... 200 lines of code
} else {
throw
}
```
is frustrating. the indentation is sometimes 6-7 tabs deep...

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

I need a way to explain to a coworker that nesting if statements beyond 3-4 is too much and needs to be re thought out. The dude is the biggest arrow head programmer I’ve ever seen. And he claims nothing is wrong with it, it works.. so what’s the problem.

Since we follow the rule of only one return per function he claims it’s the only way to accomplish the stuff he’s doing.. like if blah function passes... if blah function passss if blah functions passes do this then if blah functions

The if statements arnt just checking some variable conditions.. the conditions are checking returns of functions at each nested level the condition, executes a different function and thus checked for success.

Uggh I just don’t know how to explain to him it’s shit and needs to be re designed

Any ideas??

HTML & CSS.

To me they just feel wrong.

I have been working with them for a little over 20 years now, and it feels like very little has improved. Sure we learned to make things look a bit nicer, we got new tags and properties, but the syntax is still horrible.

The fact that both are replaced by other imperfect languages (haml, jade, less, sass, etc) is just a confirmation that their paradigms are about as fucked up and impossible to exterminate as cobol.

Which points at another problem: browsers, and how slow the web upgrade cycle is — adding native support for nested style definitions in css, or replacing html with a json document seems like a trivial problem, if it weren't for the dozens of browsers and the excruciating pace at which they can adopt standards.

What is it with certain colleagues who "wanna write C, not C++"

Motherfucker if I see another malloc in the code I will physically asssault you.

Like damn we're failing to teach people C++ badly when a newcomer from university, who had 2 semesters of "C++" doesn't even understand RAII.

And how in gods name do software engineers with *decades* of experience get so stuck on old technologies?

Like I've seen them write 3 nested try-catch to make sure a delete is called or some mutex is unlocked....

If youre in the position of teaching others C++, please stop teaching C first.

Trying to work with an API that has no response object (it just returns empty arrays if something breaks) and it's JSON is not key-value.. just a bunch of dynamic nested values. just wow.

Nested nested if statements!!!
😡😡😡😡😡😡

Oh no...

A <FlatList> as a DIRECT child of a <ScrollView>... I mean, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you forgot or it was buried in a nested component... but... it's just sitting right in front of you on the same exact component... it's like, did you even test this once and see the warnings?

God these 'affordable' devs truly aren't actually worth it.

They really aren't.

You spend just as much time fixing their clownish mess as you get for "saving money" with their cheap rates.

Another day, another clown dollar in clowntown...

SHEESH

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

I am in a situation where I am tired to give suggestions or implement any improvements to the company's app. I am in a situation where I will just do as told, nothing more, nothing less.

Regardless of how many suggestions or improvements I had made, the boss is constantly sceptically asking for "BLACK AND WHITE " proof. Sometimes, something does not require proof but cause and effect. As the application constantly prompts a DataType issue, which is a common bug in this app! I declare datatype the issue went away.

I wonder how this application can go further when they declare every variable as `var`, not using `const` for constant value, and redundant methods everywhere, most methods are not specific (in dart when you do not specify the method, the method become `dynamic`), a long list of nested if-else for something can be easily solved with switch case, etc.

So, today, right now, I will revert every improvement, and keep the original structure. If anything goes wrong, I know why it happens (deep down I will say "I told you so"). I am here to work for food, not to reinvent the wheel.

I'm so exhausted to the point where I will just go along and tell my co-worker "as you wish"

No more me suggesting.
No more me giving ideas.
No more me pointing the mistakes .

I will let them find out themselves is much better than I say it, just to prevent getting unnecessary hatred from them.

The best punishment to give somebody is to never mention their mistake let their ego do the job of consuming them into ignorance and asleep, and never wake them up. Let them commit the same mistakes repetitively until them realised there's no way to revert.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

Alright since I have to deal with this shit in my part time job I really have to ask.

What is the WORST form of abusing CSV you have ever witnessed?

I for one have to deal with something like this:

foo,1,2,3,4,5
0,2,4,3,2,1
0,5,6,4,3,1
bar,,,,,
foobar,,,,,

foo can either be foo, or a numeric value
if it is foo, the first number after the foo dictates how many times the content between this foo and the next bar is going to be repeated. Mind you, this can be nested:

foo,1,,,,
1,2,3,4,5,6
foo,10,,,,
6,5,4,3,2,1,
bar,,,,,
1,2,3,4,5,6
bar,,,,,
foobar,,,,,

foobar means the file ends.

Now since this isn't quite enough, there's also SIX DIFFERENT FLAVOURS OF THIS FILE. Each of them having different columns.

I really need to know - is it me, or is this format simply utterly stupid? I was always taught (and fuck, we always did it this way) that CSV was simply a means to store flat and simple data. Meanwhile when I explain my struggle I get a shrug and "Just parse it, its just csv!!"

To top it off, I can not use the flavours of these files interchangably. Each and everyone of them contains different data so I essentially have to parse the same crap in different ways.

OK this really needed to get outta the system

This is so annoying, I had 9 diff. jobs the past 2 years and this is my 10th and if this doesn't change I might reconsider my options again.

I came to work at a company that pays me like a Junior and treats me as an intern. My 20yo "boss" who acts as a project owner/lead dev doesn't want to learn anything new and sees any improvement as a waste of money. The problem is he thinks hes a great programmer but he doesn't know shit. Im mainly working on the Laravel installation because "I claimed I know Laravel". And its absolute garbage. They haven't used a single Laravel features besides routes and everything else is vanilla PHP. They write for loops that loop through $_REQUEST to remove a single character. Write 100 deep nested ifs and they abuse Elasticsearch to the point ES crashes because the program is using 1000 deep multidimensional arrays. Its only a webshop...

Everytime I try to make a suggestion like making the master branch protected, doing code reviews etc etc I get shut down because they are autistic and don't want anything to change.

Passing variables by reference in nested functions using PHP.
If you miss an ampersand your afternoon is very long.
😝😝😝😝😝

Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit

Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.

I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.

I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:

- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10

uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.

So here's where the story becomes a rant.

In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.

And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.

So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.

The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?

gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3

(:

I just dealt with a 3 nested "if" statements in SQL. There is no indentation so I am quite frustrated since each "if" spans up to 2-30 lines.

I now understand why Python white space is significant

Please, stop using `i`, `j` and `k` in loops... specially if they are nested, help the fellow programmer after you

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Pretty late for week 86, but I just remembered my first paid freelancing web dev work.

While not my worst experience, it was a pretty horrible task given to me...

I was helping someone implement a new design on a pretty outdated (visually and technically) PHP site.

I was getting paid crap. The guy wouldn’t even let me look at the HTML, let alone touch it, so definitely no PHP work, either...

Literally the only code I was allowed to write was CSS. So, I’m supposed to be restyling, but I can’t change the structure at all, or even ADD CSS SELECTORS.

Fine, I’ll just make your site fragile as fuck by using nested relative selectors.

#main:nth-child(3) > div > div > div > button

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there were some pages...I shit you not...that had A DOZEN LEVELS OF NESTED TABLES.

WHY. DEAR GOD WHY.

For a simple checkout page.

So, on some pages I was literally trying to access elements through relative selectors, nested within levels and levels of tables. FFS

Needless to say, I did not work for him for long. Even if I wanted to deal with that crap, my time is much more valuable than what I was being paid.

So I'm on orders for the Marine Corps, and this one guy thinks he's a programmer because he made a "program" in excel for dispatching our equipment. He's complaining that he's just fixing bugs. I take a look at his VBA code and see literally 1000 lines of if statements bundled into one function. (Or I think they're referred to as sub routines in VBA - it's been a while since I worked with it).

I try to give him some tips and pointers since he's literally just manually checking. Each. F'ing. Cell and a million nested if statements. Tried giving tips on making reusable code, and he has the cojones to tell me he knows what he's doing and doesn't need my "help". Granted I'm higher ranking than him and he also answers in a disrespectful manner.

End rant.

No your nested if statements dont make an ai the same way logging into a txt is not machine learning

My biggest influence on coding style is working with other people's code. I know the temptation to write "clever" code and I've been (and probably still occasionally am) guilty of it myself, but it's not until you have to debug someones oneliner iterator which has !(i-j) as the stop condition that you start to appreciate dumb, boring, obvious code.

If having a series of if checks in a long list makes it readable, keep it that way. If it makes it more readable to rewrite it into a nested switchcase with a couple of ternary bits, go ahead. Just don't spend half a day wrapping it up into two layers of abstraction that will require an onboarding process for the rest of the team.

That moment where you see code of someone who riddles their code with nested if-else and if-elseif statements.

I don't remember writing an else statement for years. It almost always can be avoided (and the rare cases where it makes sense I prefer the switch statement).

Yet I never grasp why people do:

```
if(someCondition) {
// huge nested code block
} else {
throw new Error();
}
```

Instead of

```
if (!someCondition) {
throw new Error();
}
// continue in the normal scope
```

And then we have experts that like doing:

```
if(someCondition) {
if (bar) {
$foo = 'narf';
} else {
$foo = 'poit';
}

// huge code block
if($foo == 'narf') {
if(yetAntherCondition) {
// huge code block
} else {
throw new Error();
}
// huge code block
} else {
throw new Error();
}
} else {
throw new Error();
}
```

Help!

If ever was to design a programming language, I'd forbid the `else` and `elseif` keywords. I have yet to find an instance where I could not replace some `else` by either a guard or an early return or introducing some polymorphism.

Someone tell me should I just give up because I'm stupid and simple shit escapes me or tell me bro calm the fuck down the guy is full of shit...

Dude says he can't verify 3rd statement in a nested IF - elseif logic because the third check for a false condition is the True condition in the first 2 statements.

So

If (mode) = manual and then
Data(g) /= Status1
Or else Data(g) = Invalid
Then
Do this thing that sounds cool
Elsif
Data(g) = Status1
And then Data(g) /= Invalid
Then
Do something else equally cool
Elsif (mode) /= manual
and then Data(g) /= Invalid
and then Data(g) /= Status1
Then
Do some less cool stuff
end if

Don't you ever try to translate code from one language to another. Instead grasp the problem and write the solution in the other language itself. You don't want to sit there for hours thinking if hashmaps are a good fit for phps nested arrays.

nested ternary operators

like/dislike?

I used to hate them cuz I would have to break them apart just to understand them, but now I use ternary operators so much, nesting at least one level is ok for me.

but i'm the only person that reads my code, what's the concensus.. nesting one level bad?

I wouldn't want someone reviewing my code if they couldn't wrap their head around a simple ternary, so if only myself or people more experienced than myself will ever read them, then fuck it, i'm using them

!rant
Before I left my other company I was in the midst of finishing one project and I was ansious to finish everything to leave as a rockstar. Now, one of my js scripts brought a huge and long json response that had many nested items and arrays and whatnot. Instead of properly destructuring or finding a particular piece that went similarly to "status": "Verify input"(that was nested unser a shitload of items) i did the unspeakable......i stringified the whole object and just used indexOf.

I still feel guilty over it...but it works :P thing is, if it returns that it means that the user entered an invalid status into the app (it was an inventory application) but it works :P

Oh well. Mind you they thought it was going to take months and I finished in 1 week so yay.

Php suxx asss. I`m at my second php dev job and I recommend all newcomers to stay away. Both projects were full of shiat developed by people with no technical background before. The current project I work on is just a bunch of nested if else like 10-15 blocks and after you finish booom there s another block of ifs . The fucking code looks like a wave. There were also some files named like file1.. file15 . Fml

Exercise do the pyramid of * and I looked up how to do it but so many people are able to do it without looking it up I dont know why shit to do with nested for loops makes me feel so dumb.

I know it's not a big deal to not know how to do every single thing but I'm always even stuck on the smallest exercises that apparently more people can do than not. Like how am I supposed to have thought about that or figured that out. How am I supposed to learn all this shit. Like for example just look up a list of basic exercises and I cant do any of them. I'm not good at this and its stressing me out because how will I get better or hell even a job if I cant solve these simple problems? How am I supposed to get better at solving these simple problems? I cant just keep looking at the fucking solution because that wont stick or teach me anything

Most stupid thing to rant about by far

Working with dildos-for-brain people! I asked how to achieve something and if I got an answer it stated: never saw something like that implemented before (It really means that people here just copy/paste shit and use iterative development method until they nab the solution)!!!

Really? I just asked to have nested XML structure, it's been around since early 90'!

I have new weekend project - polish my CV and get the fuck out of here. When it feels like you are smartest in the room and for every question for help people just throw you random answers not related to question at all it is not worth staying there.

Also using outdated XML server CMS that ceased its support, documentation is shoddy and internet never heard of it - only relevant google search leads to the CMS website. Good luck! Good fucking luck!

This shit went overboard so many times and I decided that this is the last time. I have 2 more fucks to give and those are for me!

TL;DR: Brainfuck & Abstraction is so cool!

One of my dreams is to make a Mandelbrot Fractal with Brainfuck as the one on Rosetta Code.

I'm too lazy... So i'm writing a Compiler for Brainfuck.

At now i have 900 line of Python code and the operation VAR, SET, ADD, SUB, MUL with nested operation compatibility, IF, ELSE, ENDIF...
Probably i will doing it fast directly with BF but damn if abstraction is so cool!!

So, i have that assignment about docker stuff. nifty piece of software i must say.

anyways im installing docker software on windows bc im thinking if i have something that gives me at least the correct structure and some skeletal syntax i will have a faster grasp of the thing. expecting some sort of high level ide but end up instead with what looks like a blank window, with the only obvious choice being sign into some bullshit i dont need. but thats another story

my point is:
when installing the thing it prompted me to install WSL2. which i supposedly am not supposed to have because my cpu doesnt support intel virtualisation. but being impatient (thats why i came to look for an assisted solution), i pursued the installation.

lo and behold: i end up with a shell prompt at the root of a linux filesystem!
i ran 2 or 3 muscle-memory commands and closed the prompt, i was in docker stuff up to the neck.
later on, when i go back to my project, in a virtual machine its sluggish af and screams at me that amd-v is not supported because of something something nested pages (will look up later how that one works).

dont have time to explore it some more yet, and especially experiment or even barely look at this glorious mess because i have something barely working and no time to have it fail.
but this story definitely left me perplexed.

and also : you can run WSL2 on an fx8350

I have no specific story to tell (for now. Will post ke if i remember one) but i have had tons of CS teachers that are shit. From ones who don't know shit to ones who are so bad as a human being i am sure thrte are hundreds of people out there to kill them. I have had multiple teachers where all they did was read out a book and we'd have o site everything they read. Whole fucking semester. And not just one person or once. M-U-L-T-I-P-L-E TIMES AND TEACHERS. then I ve had ones who would rejection my code even if it's better, is right, can andle more edge cases, most likely magnitfrs of times faster and isn an eye sore with just effig if-else on op of if-else nested within if-else with many for loops. Then there are those who want you to do just what they want and expect you to not have a life of your own. Those who blatantly abuse their powers. Those who couldn't care less. Those who are not that bad a teacher but their attitude and style just makes you want to leave. There's one currently who wants a group of 4 people in second year to develop a full blown industry level application in mere 3 weeks. AND WE ARE HAVING OUR THEORY PAPRRS INBETWEEN FOR 2 EFFING WEEKS. So that's just like a month. Fortunately I have a group that's good enough that I can have them do the testing and filling up the documentation​ (did I mention that he needs full documentatiin for software plus a report on how our development process) and have them work on presentation (yup. We need to present this thing) all for just 50 marks. 1 uni credit. Our system still gives 80% weightage to pure theory. Plus the practical part is somewhat theory too.

Our HOD wants us *insists*forces** to stay back at college and work on projects (which is nice but what he ments is use the shitty outdated books from early 2000s to study something). Now I'd be happy to stay back if college provided decent internet (I am not asking for gigabit speeds. Even 1-2Mbps would work) and place to sit. But nope, our college non-teaching staff is eager to send us out of their department and by extention college building. There is literally nowhere you can sit. Plus yup, there is no internet and nowhere for you to plug your laptop in. That's a moot point anyway because they don't want you to use your laptop in college library or anywhere anyways. Plus you don't get much of mobile data too because of the building design. Those work only near windows. Why would I be at college if I can get a 50+Mbps down, area to sit, snacks, port to charge all at home. And you'd say we should talk with him about this – well it's not his issue is all he has to say.

Well, such is life in Indian colleges. And my college/uni is one of the better ones.

On the newer side of web development. Using CSS Grid with some flexbox. Any idea on why my 768px media query styles are overwriting my 320px styles?

I was breaking into modules but moved everything to a single css file until I figure out what causes the issue. The mobile styles are at top and I started the medium breakpoint below the initial styles.

Designed it mobile first if that makes a difference. Should the media queries be nested?

I know that when a deadline is present, things like cyclomatic complexity might be something that is a left aside. But I hate so much having to troubleshoot a method with 15 levels deep of nested if, try-catch, loops... Fuck!

ScalaJs React compiles Scala to React.js.
There's some cool typing involved but I haven't done web front-end since nested tables were meta, so there's lots to learn.

There's exactly one senior dev at my company who is fluent in this ScalaReact, so I tag him in the PR for my project. Every day at 10:00 am, slack publicly posts a reminder with @mention that he hasn't reviewed my PR.

Three days later I haven't heard anything so I send a DM over slack asking for feedback... No response.

Four days after the PR I beg for 10 minutes of pairing time, because something in my component hierarchy smells funny. He doesn't have time for me until 5:00 .

I've now built almost a weeks worth of work on the original PR and the feedback I get is 'this works, is performant, and has no obvious bugs, but you can't merge it until you restructure the underlying component hierarchy'

It takes me and another senior dev an entire day of pairing to implement the changes without breaking anything. But, I asked for the feedback because I wanted to learn and write good clean code so I'm irritated but willing to move on.

Yesterday I posted in slack that I was having a hard time following my callback chains to find where the color was assigned to a <td (because I had to add a coloring rule). I wanted to know if I could change the type signature of a component from Tagmod (one or more HTML tags) to VdomTagOf[TableCell] so that it would be clear where the color was assigned.

Instead of just telling me 'no' and giving some context, the react dev gives me:

"Why would a dev need to know about the type unless they’re actually trying to use the thing ? Those are all great questions, but id suggest trying not to prematurely optimize for those until they actually come up"

I flipped my shit. After you couldn't make time for me for a WEEK I had to justify to the CEO why I was spending a day on PURE refactors to accommodate your PREFERENCES. Meanwhile when I'm being VULNERABLE and exposing that I am confused and struggling to complete my task you DISMISS my concerns and attack my motivations.

Unfortunately, this is all happening in the public slack channels and I start defending readability and my premise while triggered. Now I'm riding the shame train for fighting in public slack and trying to pretend none of this ever happened.

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

!rant

I just found out that if you have a list of lists in C#, you can use a LINQ statement and specify indices inside the lambda instead of nested ForEaches.

This code is giving me the vapors

When they say 'Write comments!' and you are like:
// Do necessary operations

I have been refractoring a project with a SHITTONE of comments like this and a FUCKLOAD of nested if statements. And then this commes along:
$user2 = User.find($user->id);
WHO WRITES THIS STUFF? I am never working on a cheap project from India again.

Looking back on an old ruby project with an Hadoken of nested unless, if elsif then end. F me!

If you think laravel is easy, try to modify your json response in a way that's not too nested.

Not all language have built-in null-checking capabilities. We have a hard time in the front-end to do null checking if there are any nested(level 3 or more) JSON Response.

This got me fucked up. Listen yo.

So we have this issue on our modal right. The issue keeps poppin. It's a hotfix because its in prod. So my senior and I were on it. After a few hours, I showed him the part of the code that is buggy. It's 50 lines of code of nested if-else, else-if. And so we're still fighting it. He redid everything since we're using angular2 he did a subject, behavior-subject all that bs and I was still trying to understand what's the bug, because it's happening on the second click and so I did my own thing and found the cause bug and showed it to him, its this:

setTimeout( () => {}, 0)

the bootstrap-modal doesn't allow async inside it (I dont why, its in the package). So he explained to me why it's there. So I did my own thing again and find a workaround which I did, a one-line of angular property, showed it to him he didn't accept it because we'll still have to redo it with subjects and he was on it. I said ok. Went back to my previous issue. The director came in and ask for a fixed, my senior came up to me and told me to push my fix. Alright no problem. So we good now. Went back to our thing bla bla bla, then got an email that we will have a meeting, So we went, bla bla bla. The internal team wants a support for mobile, senior said no problem bla bla bla, after the meeting he approaches me and said (THIS IS WHERE IT GOT FUCKED UP) we wont be supporting bootstrap4 anymore because of the modal issue and since we're going to support mobile and BOOTSTRAP4 grid system is NONINTUITIVE we are moving to material design because the grid system is easier. I was blown away man. we have more than 100 components and just because of that modal and mobile support shit he decided to abandon bootstrap. Mater of fact its the modal its his code. I'm not expert in frontend but I looked at the material design implementation its the same thing other than the class names. OHHH LAWD!

So for the past two days I had to deal with a problem where I have to do a nested query with sequelize, pretty straight forward reading the documentation, or that was I think. I implemented everything according to the docs but the query stills fails, why ? I had no idea, I double check my implementation, I googled the error, no luck, after a day searching like crazy I talked with the backend lead about this and he help me to realize that the naming convention was changing because sequelize is creating a nested (SELECT * FROM) because one of the relations has a one-to-many realtion with the root model and I'm why the heck is doing that? But we both didn't know, and the problem was solved by just modifying the names, so we let it through, and sent it to QA. The next day I see the task rejected by QA and the reason was after the changes were merged another part of the app was broken, ok np, I'll fix it right away, and oh God I found the error was caused by another query that was including the first query we fix yesterday ! It was a nested query with 3 lvls! And the names became even more complex ( like `model1->model2.colum1`), goddamit, ok, I spent most of the day searching again, nothing, read the specification of the findAll function, nope, tried to put that name in the ON clause as the docs suggested, still an error, shit, then the lead helps me again and creates a literal which can hold that name and voila! Everything is happiness, at least for that moment, but I was still curious about this behavior, so I keep digging on it and I've just found an issue where a great guy posted an option to the findAll method that is not documented in any version of sequelize ! WTF ! And this option was "subQuery" which if you set it to false it won't create that additional (SELECT * FROM) from before, FUUUCK! I can't believe it, I know that all the effort works in my favor because I learn more about sequelize, but FFS I'm still angry because this shit shouldn't happen, you need to update the god damn docs, it's just adding a row and telling the people what it does. Well to end this, after putting that in the query and replacing all the workarounds with the expected syntaxis everything works like charm.

Use simple working code of an if statement and reject bad data with an error.

Get the same result but through properly using springs nested path errors. But it doesn't work so now you need to spend hours in debug hell through spring framework code for something that should be easy, is blocking another team, because I have no idea how to do my fucking job.

[opinions welcome]
I'm just furious right now!!!

So I'm on this project where we have to make a whole *very old* website look like it's brand new.

Thing is, the whole point of the project is to make exactly the same pages as on the existing website smh. No UX or UI suggestions.
Just put the navbar in a component that looks like a tab bar, who cares anyway!?

Btw, I'm in charge of the UI.

My colleagues and I (mostly my colleagues) made a react components library and we use it for this project.
Fucking inputs get thrown into tables and all that, but hey, that's what the client asked for.

So here I am with my shiny new page, and I just hand it over to the front-end dev who just arrived.
She's supposed to feed in the data.
I don't give a fuck you use flow or redux or whatever fancy tooling.
Just call your back-end, get the data, format it and feed my damn table with it. That's it.

So today, after 5 weeks she's in, she calls a meeting where she's screening a presentation to the team complaining about how long it took her to understand what I did and change it completely.
Pieces of code on screen, saying it's crap and it shouldn't be like that.

I'm not responsible for inputs in fucking table, the client is!
Of course I have nested components with data passed through all the way: it's a series of fucking radio buttons within a table within a form!

During 5 weeks, yoy didn't even come to me once saying it's not what you expected or you're having trouble with my work!
And there we blaming my job like I'm the bad guy?!

Tonight, everyone's going home thinking I'm no good at what I do and completely lost, all because of her.

If you got this far, I'd like to hear from you on how I should act with her and how to tell her what she did is awfully wrong?

I had a mandate to help bring a couple of fellow QA testers up to speed on basic automated test code, fill in any knowledge gaps and answer questions.

Met with one co-worker and figured I'd start with his questions and work from there. He opened his test code and said he focused on learning 'if statements' last week but his test isn't running and just throwing errors.

Upon inspection, I realized it was a deeply nested (sometimes 10 or more conditions) single method soup that had never been run through even a syntax check. I blinked... *coughed* and spent the next few hours trying to "port the desired functionality" to a new file while he watched.

Hi guys, If you are front end dev (especially react dev) please read this and share your thoughts.
I recently started with react.js. But I didn't like the idea of nesting components. I know this is too early to talk about it. I'm not halfway through tutorials. But I'm loosing motivation to learn react.js
This never happened to me. I learned few frameworks in past. Django and codeigniter. They follow MVC/MVT architecture. And writing code in it looks cleaner and simpler.
In react JSX is confusing at first. You have to read same line twice or thrice to understand. I'm not saying JSX is bad, but it's not readable enough.

In early lessons I learnt that in react everything is component. And every component comes under one root component. Don't you guys think this well get messy for large application. You are dealing with number of nested components from one file into another.

I'm not against react. But the way react is forcing you to write code, is not something I enjoy. Let me know your thoughts. Maybe I'll get some kinda booster to continue react.

Profile (1, 1) --- (1, 1) User

Right?

- A single user *must* have *exactly* 1 profile.
- A single profile *must* belong to *exactly* 1 user.

Makes sense?

I did this because i moved user profile image and user banner image into Profile entity

So now i can easily join tables and fetch user profile image based on username or user ID

By deeply thinking like an asshole and overengineering, i stumbled upon a confusion

If i can join tables and get ALL fields (assuming its a left or full outer join) from both entities...

What is the difference between choosing which entity to fetch on the frontend?

For example if i want to fetch users, inversely, i can fetch Profile entity, which has User entity as a nested object, and that way access users. Now i have access to each user's profile image, banner image, bio etc aside from the entire user object

If the user navigates to a profile page, inversely, i can fetch User entity which will have a Profile entity as a nested object, and that way show the remaining necessary fields that the profile page needs to show

I gave these inverse examples because if i want to fetch users, surely enough i can simply fetch from User entity, and if i want to fetch someones profile data i can fetch from Profile entity directly

So if this is the case, when am i supposed to fetch one over the other?

You tell me. For simplicity lets focus on these two examples. Consider this as an exam question:

1) user navigates to home page. Now paginated users with role X need to be shown, but also their profile image. Do you fetch from User or Profile entity? If you use joins which ones and why?

2) user navigates to their or someone elses profile page. Now profile-based data needs to be shown, but also the user's username and full name need to be shown. Do you fetch from User or Profile entity? If you use joins which ones and why?

When you want to investigate what a function does, you read the name and say "ok, seems reasonable what it should be doing" ... and then you encounter an adventure of if-else's, nested if's and else's, some promises here and there (with more nested if's and else's) and also a bunch of dispatches sprinkled all over the place. You want to refactor it into tinier functions but can't because you don't know what happens where ... help ... 🙄😩

!rant

so, I somehow got an interview with NASDAQ for the summer internship this year. somehow it was the only company that had cleared my resume for the interview process, other companies didn't even scheduled one.

and I messed up the first technical interview.

the interviewer asked me to find the largest element in a nested list in python.

for ex [[3,4],[5,2,9],[1,7]] would return [4,9,7]

it was a verbal interview on call and he asked what would I use? Lambda function or list comprehension.

I said lambda function. (I knew it was list comprehension, if I had to code I wouldn't have got confused between the two)

later he asked a couple of questions about linux and boot processes, I could answer some of the basic ones but not after 3rd or 4th question.

now I don't think I have anything to do for summer, as it's a little too late for finding the internships.

any advice?

Why do my coworkers use soooooooooooo many if statements and neast nested if statements?! 🤔

Recently joined new Android app (product) based project & got source code of existing prod app version.

Product source code must be easy to understand so that it could be supported for long term. In contrast to that, existing source structure is much difficult to understand.

Package structure is flat only 3 packages ui, service, utils. No module based grouped classes.

No memory release is done. So on each screen launch new memory leaks keep going on & on.

Too much duplication of code. Some lazy developer in the past had not even made wrappers to avoid direct usage of core classes like Shared Preference etc. So at each place same 4-5 lines were written.

Too much if-else ladders (4-5 blocks) & unnecessary repetitions of outer if condition in inner if condition. It looks like the owner of this nested if block implementation has trust issues, like that person thought computer 'forgets' about outer if when inside inner if.

Too much misuse of broadcast receiver to track activities' state in the era of activity, apપ life cycle related Android library.

Sometimes I think why people waste soooo... much efforts in the wrong direction & why can't just use library?!!

These things are found without even deep diving into the code, I don't know how much horrific things may come out of the closet.

This same app is being used by many companies in many different fields like banking, finance, insurance, govt. agencies etc.

Sometimes I surprise how this source passed review & reached the production.

Default dict that returns default dict on configparser to replace "if/try/nested .get()" to just "or"

In the end I had just
data = source or source1 or source2 or source3

Can you recommend a design pattern for dealing with workflows?

I am wondering how to represent a decision tree while also making it easy to maintain and each step should be unit-testable on its own.

I want to avoid a big if-else-block, but I am also unsure what design pattern to apply here.

Basically, there a bunch of yes-no-question (though some conditions may be more complex) that can be nested very deeply, and depending on a certain set of requirements we want to display different actions.

(The workflow is fixed, there is only 1 at at time yet it may change a lot over the next iterations until we figure out what our userbase wants.)