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Search - "not a cake"
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Worst dev I've interviewed?
"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).
Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."
Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"
Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.
The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")
After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."
Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."
After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).24 -
Started being a Teaching Assistant for Intro to Programming at the uni I study at a while ago and, although it's not entirely my piece of cake, here are some "highlights":
* students were asked to use functions, so someone was ingenious (laughed my ass off for this one):
def all_lines(input):
all_lines =input
return all_lines
* "you need to use functions" part 2
*moves the whole code from main to a function*
* for Math-related coding assignments, someone was always reading the input as a string and parsing it, instead of reading it as numbers, and was incredibly surprised that he can do the latter "I always thought you can't read numbers! Technology has gone so far!"
* for an assignment requiring a class with 3 private variables, someone actually declared each variable needed as a vector and was handling all these 3 vectors as 3D matrices
* because the lecturer specified that the length of the program does not matter, as long as it does its job and is well-written, someone wrote a 100-lines program on one single line
* someone was spamming me with emails to tell me that the grade I gave them was unfair (on the reason that it was directly crashing when run), because it was running on their machine (they included pictures), but was not running on mine, because "my Python version was expired". They sent at least 20 emails in less than 2h
* "But if it works, why do I still have to make it look better and more understandable?"
* "can't we assume the input is always going to be correct? Who'd want to type in garbage?"
* *writes 10 if-statements that could be basically replaced by one for-loop*
"okay, here, you can use a for-loop"
*writes the for loop, includes all the if-statements from before, one for each of the 10 values the for-loop variable gets*
* this picture
N.B.: depending on how many others I remember, I may include them in the comments afterwards19 -
API Guy.
He has a serious regex problem.
Regexes are never easy to read, but the ones he uses just take the cake. They're either blatantly wrong, or totally over-engineered garbage that somehow still lacks basic functionality. I think "garbage" here is a little too nice, since you can tell what garbage actually is/was without studying it for five minutes.
In lieu of an actual rant (mostly because I'm overworked), I'll just leave a few samples here. I recommend readying some bleach before you continue reading.
Not a valid url name regex:
VALID_URL_NAME_REGEX = /\A[\w\-]+\Z/
Semi-decent email regex: (by far the best of the four)
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i
Over-engineered mess that only works for (most) US numbers:
VALID_PHONE_REGEX = /1?\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-8][0-9])\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-9]{2})\s*\W?\s*([0-9]{4})(\se?x?t?(\d*))?/
and for the grand finale:
ZIP_CODE_REGEX = /(^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{1}[A-Z]{1} *\d{1}[A-Z]{1}\d{1}$)|GIR[ ]?0AA|((AB|AL|B|BA|BB|BD|BH|BL|BN|BR|BS|BT|CA|CB|CF|CH|CM|CO|CR|CT|CV|CW|DA|DD|DE|DG|DH|DL|DN|DT|DY|E|EC|EH|EN|EX|FK|FY|G|GL|GY|GU|HA|HD|HG|HP|HR|HS|HU|HX|IG|IM|IP|IV|JE|KA|KT|KW|KY|L|LA|LD|LE|LL|LN|LS|LU|M|ME|MK|ML|N|NE|NG|NN|NP|NR|NW|OL|OX|PA|PE|PH|PL|PO|PR|RG|RH|RM|S|SA|SE|SG|SK|SL|SM|SN|SO|SP|SR|SS|ST|SW|SY|TA|TD|TF|TN|TQ|TR|TS|TW|UB|W|WA|WC|WD|WF|WN|WR|WS|WV|YO|ZE)(\d[\dA-Z]?[ ]?\d[ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}))|BFPO[ ]?\d{1,4}/
^ which, by the way, doesn't match e.g. Australian zip codes. That cost us quite a few sales. And yes, that is 512 characters long.47 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
Story of my most useless meeting?
Too many to mention. Here's one. Years ago a new HR associate was specifically hired to better engage the workforce. About once a week, she conducted about an hour to two hour meetings which consisted of every 'touchy-feely' idea you could think of. I swear any day I was going to walk into a meeting and do the "fall back into your partner" trust exercises.
One particular meeting, 'Betty' engaged us with the topic of what keeps us motivated, and I was a little more annoyed than usual because I was behind on a system critical project and these meetings were mandatory.
User1: "Knowing I make customer satisfaction my number one priority."
User2: "The strong sense of accomplishment I feel by doing my best"
Me: "Money"
<you could almost hear Betty's gasp>
Betty: "Oh, no, money shouldn't be the motivator. Money is like icing on the cake. Tell us what keeps you happy and engaged."
<other users nod their heads in engagement>
Me: "Again, money."
User3: "I can't...ugh..I don't believe..oh..why would you say that? I think being part of such a great team is payment enough."
<more nodding of heads>
Me: "Do you work for free? I don't. None of us do. Would any of you keep doing your jobs here if you weren't getting paid?"
Betty: "That is really not the point of this meeting."
Me: "Sure it is. I'll bet if Order Taking starting providing bonuses for positive after-call surveys, employee satisfaction would go through the roof. Anyone else like that idea?"
Betty: "Your attitude isn't helping this discussion. Lets move on."
Me: "Lets not. In 20?? the Gartner group performed a study where they 'discovered' the primary motivator for employees was money. You want employees to perform better, you pay them. It is really that simple."
<I could see the looks of "Its OK to speak my mind?" and others wanting to speak up>
Betty: "Moving on. Lets go over the company core values again and discuss how they enrich our lives at work and at home."
I kept quiet for the rest of the meeting.
The poop hit the fan, and my boss pulls me into a conference room
Boss: "Betty is really pissed at you. She went directly to the VP of HR"
Me: "Good. Does this mean I don't have to attend the enrichment meetings?"
Boss: "Yea, that was her idea of punishment. Lucky bastard."8 -
When you start a new job as a Senior Developer, and start asking questions about the code, and you have these collections of conversations with other front-end people:
Exhibit 1:
Me: Ahh so I see the filtering and pagination is all done with Javascript in the front end...
Random dev: No, it's done with Angular.
Exhibit 2:
Me: I think we should add frontend pagination to this page. There will be too many elements on it if you're a customer with 2000 servers.
Random dev: Don't bother, there's no pagination in the API call... So that will not gain any performance.
Me: But it wouldn't take long to implement and it would improve the user experience, why would you want to show ALL the elements, when you have an option not to... Also, it WILL be a major performance hit, especially on mobile.
Random dev: People will use search anyway.
😥🔪
Also, there are no coding standards, every file looks different, and my opinion is being disregarded in everything, and I thought my last job was bad...
Seriously how are some people hired as front-enders?
Since I just took this job, I feel obligated to stay a couple of months... But hey, don't cry for me, I might have more rants for you. 😂
Sorry for the long rant, here's cake: 🍰5 -
Yeah Mozilla fuck merit and fuck you too!
This, this is what I was talking about when the fucking CoC came out and everyone (including it's author) started it using it as a political weapon.
You castrated fucking virgins! Mozilla, I want to support you I really don't like chrome but you always manage to disappoint everyone. I'm tired, tired of you morally superior socialists infecting my fucking workplace, entertainment and news.
This is just an excuse for lazy assholes to have their cake and eat it too and it's damn fucking INSULTING to us "minorities", I can work to get nice things just like anyone else bitch! having another skin color is not a disability!
Worst of all, you seem to have straight out millennial retards making these decisions seeing as it's based on an article from a washed up "gender research" professor that thinks Barbie Doctor is problematic, the most biased and dumb source you can possibly pull out of your ass.
Two classmates were murdered this morning, do you really think we care about what your diversity and inclusion Dept thinks it's problematic? You delusional halfwits, the only comforting thought is that your soft bigotry will perish alongside your product when it inevitably diminishes it's quality for sake of "equality".
Want to make better products? Ditch your useless diversity and inclusion department and start optimizing the memory consumption on firefox.
Want to help minorities? Start paying your outsourced developers decently.
I hope this helps people who thought including politics in software development wouldn't have dire consecuences to open their eyes; if not, oh well I guess people will get it when mozilla keeps going down the drain and they get fired because they just outsourced their work in the name of "diversity" just to save money.
https://blog.mozilla.org/inclusion/...100 -
Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:
After 10 years of service the company gives the employee an anniversary party, complete with cake, drinks, etc.
Preparing for a party, HR set the cake in the break-room and left to get the other supplies, in the mean time the IS department manager 'John' walks in, sees the cake and decides to take a slice.
Not a small corner piece you may not notice by smearing the frosting around, but a big piece from the * middle of the cake *.
'Mary' walks in and catches him.
M: "JOHN! The cake is for Eddie's party! Everyone will be here any minute!"
John: "Oh shit!..sorry, let me put it back..."
M: "NO!, you've already eaten some...the cake is ruined!"
<he had icing all over his hands, so he used the cake knife to cut, but used his hands to dig out the slice, so the cake looked pretty tore up>
J:"How was I supposed to know? All I saw was free cake!"
M: "You are on the invite list for Eddie's party! You have 'Happy Anniversary Eddie' on your plate!"
J: "Party isn't until 2:00...<looks at the breakroom clock> oh shit...it's 2"
About that time, several VPs walk in, notice Mary is upset and after finding out, our IS-VP said "John, I'm not happy about this. I want you in my office after the party. You can leave ...now!"
Our IS-VP is almost always emotionless (mostly just happy and in a good mood), it was the first time anyone had seen him this physically angry in years. We don't know how John kept his job.17 -
I absolutely love the email protocols.
IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT
Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.
SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.
Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".
Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.
Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?9 -
Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.
The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.
1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).
Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).
I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).
What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.
My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.
Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.16 -
If I died, I would have one regret.
I once worked in a code base whose messiness would make an oil spill in the fucking pacific ocean look like spilled milk on the floor in comparison.
Naturally, it had bugs. Oh BOY did it have bugs. Most of them were taken care of well enough. Or about as well as anyone insane enough to work in that code could.
There was just this one bug, which I still (un)fondly call "my bug of 2 years". It. Just. Didn't. Make. Sense.
It was written in JavaScript. Naturally. Which by itself, is the metaphorical programming language equivalent of a pile of horse manure. But this bug. It was the guano icing on top of the horse manure cake which is JavaScript.
I LITERALLY spent 2 years trying to find a solution. I woke up at night, thinking of explanations. I had dreams about fixing the damn thing. And I never did.
On the day I left the job, I had to pass it on to a friend (who hasn't solved the fucker yet either).
I hated that bug with all my heart. But..
Now that I think back, all the books I read, all the docs that I scoured, every non working fix I coded and every failed efforts I made on it, eventually made me a better programmer.
So cherish your bugs and issues. Sometimes, they come, not to hurt you, but to help you grow (unless you use JS, those bugs just wanna fuck you).3 -
A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.
And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.
OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.
Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.31 -
So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.3 -
Regex.
I HATE YOU.
There. I've said it.
I spent the better part of the last hour trying to wrangle together, not one, but TWO regexes and getting them to work with Python's "re" module.
The worst part about these little shits? It's how well they work once you figure out how to get them to work. For example, pulling a phone number out of a paragraph is difficult with string methods, but cake with regex . . . if you can figure out the pattern.
But I think I'll always have hate in my heart for Regex just for how obtuse and frustrating they can be.
F**k you regex.19 -
Boss: Why did you schedule a party?
Me: newGuy just made his first productive contribution to the group.
Boss: That's great! On that note I'd like you to meet superNewGuy. He's like newGuy but comes with the added bonus of being unfireable!
Me:........... You don't get cake........undefined newguy he's still not house trained but meh success webdev webdesign supernewguy boss problems party cake a pox on his house1 -
As a guy studying computer science but working part time as an It support i get a lot of weird questions which can be easily answered by Google or solved by restarting the PC . The cake however goes to the guy with the PhD in physics who called me to his office and said something was wrong with his laptop battery because he was not getting any charge. He was almost panicking because he couldn't afford to lose his files when the PC ran out of juice.
Upon inspection the power was not plugged in.1 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
Just had an old coworker from a previous job send me some stuff for a php script he was having issues with.
There was too much glory in what he was trying to do: mixing php inside of jquery code, not using strict types would have prevented like 10 issues he was having on his script on another portion, mixing headers, weirdly named variables, poorly constructed, reused db connections, 0 oop or proper dependency management in his code, horrible use of sessions and cookies, O (n²) logic all over the place.
But the cake.....are y'all ready for it? It was code screenshots, not even of just the section, no, the full page, from a windows machine (to make it better he is hosting the application on an IIS server and his configuration was not properly set) but I digress, back to the cake:
He was writing his code inside of wordpad :P
FUCKING WORDPAD
I just politely told him that I was busy at the moment and happily ignored him. Dude is not a good person to begin with imo, for example, he brought the subject of homosexuality during one of our talks after he saw me talking to my bf, who just so happens to be gay, his statement was "I do not understand how there can be gay people when there are women that are so hot"
My comeback was "I do not understand how we can be heterosexual when there are some really attractive dudes out there, see how stupid your logic sounds? attractiveness is not the basis for homosexuality ye dipstick" he let it go after that, but close minded people like that are not really my cup of tea.14 -
Fun day, lots of relief and catharsis!
Client I was wanting to fire has apparently decided that the long term support contract I knew was bullshit from go will instead be handled by IBM India and it's my job to train them in the "application." Having worked with this team (the majority of whom have been out of university for less than a year), I can say categorically that the best of them can barely manage to copy and paste jQuery examples from SO, so best of fucking luck.
I said, "great!," since I'd been planning on quitting anyways. I even handed them an SOW stating I would train them for 2 days on the application's design and structure, and included a rider they dutifully signed that stated, "design and structure will cover what is needed to maintain the application long term in terms of its basic routing, layout and any 'pages' that we have written for this application. The client acknowledges that 3rd party (non-[us]) documentation is available for the technologies used, but not written by [us], effective support of those platforms will devolve to their respective vendors on expiry of the current support contract."
Contract in hand, and client being too dumb to realize that their severing of the maintenance agreement voids their support contract, I can safely share what's not contractually covered:
- ReactiveX
- Stream based programming
- Angular 9
- Any of the APIs
- Dotnet core
- Purescript
- Kafka
- Spark
- Scala
- Redis
- K8s
- Postgres
- Mongo
- RabbitMQ
- Cassandra
- Cake
- pretty much anything not in a commit
I'm a little giddy just thinking about the massive world of hurt they've created for themselves. Couldn't have happened to nicer assholes.3 -
"Impossible deadline experience?"
When product owners promise delivery dates.
One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.
We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".
It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.
So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.
Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.
Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.8 -
Long story short a guy texted me on Xing, he had an interesting idea, I joined in and now we are founding a startup.
Short story long, a guy texted me on Xing. I usually don't give a fuck because there always just fucktards that want to offer me modern enslavement. No thanks you lifeless greedy hamsters! (no offense) This time was different though. It was not the usual kind of words and the idea sounded pretty awesome. So I gave it a try.
We met in a Café and talked about the idea and about my role in it. It went pretty well and we basically had a nice little chat, coffee and cake.
I was still not convinced. It sounded to good to be true. Why would something like this ever happen to me? You know that kind of feeling. It was like "Hopefully I'm not selling my soul to the devil now."
We now work on the project, already have 5 customers and are a step before the first financial investment. I'm pretty amazed how that turned out!
Now to disappoint you a bit more (or maybe to give you hope?) All I've worked so far (except that one little one-year internship) happend by, me talking to someone that had a job, me being honest about what I want and me rejecting anything that runed my guts inside out. That's it. I never really applied for something. I just get to know the people and with that comes the opportunity. Just be respectful, curious and honest. The others will notice. Chances rise that you'll find something you love todo.4 -
So I just spent the last few hours trying to get an intro of given Wikipedia articles into my Telegram bot. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an API! But unfortunately it's born as a retard.
First I looked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and almost thought that that was a Wikipedia article about API's. I almost skipped right over it on the search results (and it turns out that I should've). Upon opening and reading that, I found a shitload of endpoints that frankly I didn't give a shit about. Come on Wikipedia, just give me the fucking data to read out.
Ctrl-F in that page and I find a tiny little link to https://mediawiki.org/wiki/... which is basically what I needed. There's an example that.. gets the data in XML form. Because JSON is clearly too much to ask for. Are you fucking braindead Wikipedia? If my application was able to parse XML/HTML/whatevers, that would be called a browser. With all due respect but I'm not gonna embed a fucking web browser in a bot. I'll leave that to the Electron "devs" that prefer raping my RAM instead.
OK so after that I found on third-party documentation (always a good sign when that's more useful, isn't it) that it does support JSON. Retardpedia just doesn't use it by default. In fact in the example query that was a parameter that wasn't even in there. Not including something crucial like that surely is a good way to let people know the feature is there. Massive kudos to you Wikipedia.. but not really. But a parameter that was in there - for fucking CORS - that was in there by default and broke the whole goddamn thing unless I REMOVED it. Yeah because CORS is so useful in a goddamn fucking API.
So I finally get to a functioning JSON response, now all that's left is parsing it. Again, I only care about the content on the page. So I curl the endpoint and trim off the bits I don't need with jq... I was left with this monstrosity.
curl "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php/...=*" | jq -r '.query.pages[0].revisions[0].slots.main.content'
Just how far can you nest your JSON Wikipedia? Are you trying to find the limits of jq or something here?!
And THEN.. as an icing on the cake, the result doesn't quite look like JSON, nor does it really look like XML, but it has elements of both. I had no idea what to make of this, especially before I had a chance to look at the exact structured output of that command above (if you just pipe into jq without arguments it's much less readable).
Then a friend of mine mentioned Wikitext. Turns out that Wikipedia's API is not only retarded, even the goddamn output is. What the fuck is Wikitext even? It's the Apple of wikis apparently. Only Wikipedia uses it.
And apparently I'm not the only one who found Wikipedia's API.. irritating to say the least. See e.g. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...
Needless to say, my bot will not be getting Wikipedia integration at this point. I've seen enough. How about you make your API not retarded first Wikipedia? And hopefully this rant saves someone else the time required to wade through this clusterfuck.12 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
frameworks are great and all but it gets much harder to google stuff. a lot of people use php, not that many use cake7
-
Why does the Snapchat ad for a "blender cake" have to have a trailer involving blending rubber ducks? Do they not know how useful those are????1
-
I'm so fed up of this shitty ultra-ortodox industry
I've worked on many different projects, been in many different teams. It's an ever changing industry, but, surprisingly, it's so orthodox. Dev industry nowadays have some rules, that everybody adopts them as "best practices". You have to work on pull requests, and several of your teammates have to review your shit (as if they have nothing better to do).
I'm sick of people using fucking DTOs in shitty frameworks like Laravel. Using DTOs in Laravel is like putting mustard in a fucking chocolate cake.
I'm so fed up of SPAs and node.js. I've yet so see a single SPA that handles jwt tokens correctly. I'm tired of spending hours and hours, days and days, struggling with thousandls of layers of abstractions instead of being productive and getting the shit done.
Because end customers don't give a shit about your "best practices": They have a problem and you are getting paid for it to be solved, not for spending hours and hours struggling with stupid Javascript and its crazy async nature and their crappy libraries.
Damnit. I say. Now. I now feel better. Thanks for listening :)14 -
Couple of jobs back we got bought out by that massive shipping company with the red and yellow colors.
We used macs and some high up moron decided it was a good idea to put on domain policy restrictions on our macs, but developers can't work without admin access so if we wanted to keep said admin access, we had to sign a written agreement indicating that we were not allowed to do certain thing, like change our wallpaper or install personal music players, you know like Spotify, which at the time was what most of us used.
Now this was just a nice cherry on the cake of stupid descision that was making me rethink working there. Thanks to the high demand for skilled front ends, it was 11 am when we got this, 3pm I had comnfirmed my interview for the next day.
An hour later our manager called us all in to explain this was BS formalities. Well too fucking late, learn to communicate you dumb shit.1 -
I will start my own companies:-
A.I. Job Centre (true A.I. would get bored of their employer and search for greater challenges)
A.I. Counselling (dev life)
A.I. Pornsites (because all A.I. should have a binary life of work and play <3)
A cake factory (so the cake is not a lie)
A.I. devRant (to lower their work efficiency)
I then use the funds from the above to hire a team and we'd develop a flawless Wannacry for A.I. (for a dementia like effect)
You can all have your jobs back and you're welcome. -
So TripleByte ended in rejection though they gave very detailed feedback and specific areas and even resources to look at. 👍
But it seems I'm not going to be able to escape algorithms in interviews so I'm not getting a new job anytime soon, even in tech.
So the only thing left to try in order to get my cake seems to be joining an open source project. -
TL;DR;
I was asked to give estimation on an app, that:
1. No one has a clue what it does, even though there is v1 on the store with almost 10% of functionality working
2. No one has a clue what should be in the new rewritten version
3. We are already behind schedule and I have no clue why, I've just been told that
4. They need UI flow that shows how the app will work with static data and when API's are ready (because ya know, writing code is easier than creating wireframes and modifying them accordingly) I will then need to link app with API as if it is as simple as drinking a cup of water, especially that: 1. What is water? 2. Do I have a cup or is it given, and 3. Relax bro, drinking water is like eating a burger, piece of cake!
I'm not sure what to do, not enough that it's React Native but also spaghetti requirements that no one was able to answer my simple question: What is the app responsible of?
P.S.: Some say I must rewrite the old app ONLY, no new features, others say: Turn the new web portal into mobile app, I say: WTF is going one?6 -
Piece of shit cake. I'll stab you in the goddamn virtual neck with a screwdriver. Not get my nuget packages. Go fuck yourself in your fat fucking ass. Goddamn, who automated this build process. I did. Fuck me.5
-
programming is not a piece of cake that you come and eat.
friend of mine thinks programming is so simple.
fuck you who think its easy it takes hours of dedication6 -
Rant from a previous gig I just remembered that reignited my fury lol
Suddenly, CSV exports became massively critical to our product's success. "They were always part of the plan, if we don't have them the product is a failure". Plot twist, they were NOT always part of the plan. And our backend is not at all designed for querying the combinations of data you're asking for.
Nevermind we've been entirely focused these last few months on making the new user experience as slick as possible because "our customers want cake, not meat and potatoes". Forget the fact that, in order to meet the deadlines, my team coupled the backend a little too much with the needs of the frontend because otherwise integrations took too long. We NEED fucking CSV exports of everything you can fucking imagine.
No. Fuck you. If you want it, it's gonna take at least 2 engineers and a month, and according to you we only have a few weeks of runway. No, I'm not compromising jack shit, this is the reality we live in. This is going to go nuclear in production if we don't do it right. Either give us the month and bankrupt the company, or fucking drop it.
Or...you could go cry to the frontend team for solutions. And convince them to page through ALL of the data and generate CSVs in the fucking browser. Sure, it sort of works in QA with the miniscule amount of data we have there, but how'd that work out for you in prod?
Jesus fucking christ why are you people such incompetent morons, and how the fuck did you become executives??2 -
Today, a freelance javascript developer at my office told me that he designed a new website for one of his customers. I was intrigued that he is also designing and was very interested.
He showed me some images and I asked how he designed it. I thought he would come up with Figma, Sketch or whatever software, but he showed me the AI prompt.
I told him that he did not design it, but AI did that, prompting AI is not designing. He did not agree and rephrased it as "I made this".
After I said "But if I go to a bakery and ask for a cake with some nice decorations, and the baker is making that, I did not make the cake". He angry said, "You don't understand AI," and put his earplugs in and isn't talking to me since.
Prompting an AI is not creating. The AI/computing power with it's context is creating your stuff..18 -
This happened a couple months ago, but I wanted to share this one, since it still baffles me.
We were hiring and had this weird candidate. The team said no to the guy after the interview, management still hired him and pressured us to train him, which cost us tons of hours we had to somehow squeeze in during a hot phase of our project.
After almost 3.5 weeks training he had to hand in a small component. What he handed in was brainlessly duplicated, half of the stuff in there wasn't even used, the other half wasn't working properly. At the review we asked questions about the code he handed in - he could not answer one of them.
We then had a big argument with management to let the guy go, which they eventually unhappily agreed to.
The icing on that cake of a story: Turns out, the guy was hired as a senior dev with a way higher paycheck than most of the devs on the team. Wtf?!9 -
Started a job as a full stack developer. My first task was shocking! Do these small edits on this backend script that collects stuff from one database and edits the entries in another... piece of cake so far!
Here is the project on the TFS...
HOLD ON! IS THIS VISUAL BASIC?!!
I came here to do .Net framework development and .Net Standard... I wasn’t told that there will be VB, I have never used vb.net before.
Now... that I’m going to maintain this script in the future, I decided to rewrite it in C#, few things I learned on my journey of doing this:
1- There is an access modifier in VB called Friend
2- There is a data structure/type called Collection, it’s a value,key pair! Not key value pair... Value first, then key!!
3- Do you know how null is null everywhere?!! In VB they call it Nothing! Yes, as in...
if(myVar == nothing)
{
//stuff
}
Asking the guy responsible for that choice... he thinks VB is easier to read than C#
I DONT WANT YOU TO READ IT, I WANT IT TO MAKE SENSE AND WORK WITH THE REST OF THE C# CODE WE HAVE!!9 -
Separation of concerns is a beautiful thing.
JSX is fucking ugly. Fuck that shit. I hate JSX with a passion.
Here is one. Did you know that the digestive system works really hard to digest the food eaten?
How about we blend all the food before consuming it? Take a blender and add a cup of coffee, add some salad, add a piece of cake, a few slices of pizza, hot sauce and for good measure add some juice, or whatever-you-eat-for-lunch.
After all, all that food is going to get mixed anyway. This is more efficient!
No? Why not? Because it's ugly, highly unappetizing, disgusting even, and it takes away the pleasure of eating, the enjoyment of a good meal.
That in a nutshell is JSX: mashing up everything together under the pretext of efficiency.
Web development not only is an art, but above all must be enjoyable to those who devote their lives to it. And ugly ain't gonna cut it.11 -
I am learning java at school and my teacher asked me to make a work on JTA (java transaction API). There's not a lot of tutos on it on the web so I say to myself "go on, give it a try, you'll only learn by trying."
I finally find how to make the @TransactionType, where to put the @Stateless, my test works, nice. Finally I want to try a case where it shouldn't work, just to be sure the rollback works well. The test goes and... NullPointerException. Wtf ! Normally, my catch is supposed to, well, catch the error !
And finally, I was just stupid. My catch worked great. But I put a "throw e" inside.
Now I wanna hides under blankets, cry, eat cake and never see my coworkers again.2 -
Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?
- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.
Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.
But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!
After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:
- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.
Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.7 -
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
(:1 -
Quick and probably duplicate.
One fucking more time someone comes to me and interrupts me, I swear if it's not important, or chitchat, or something easly googlable, or something you could ask literally anyone else or something that isn't even my shit to handle, I will give the unlucky bastard 30 minute lesson to not fucking interrupt me when Im trying to focus first half of fucking day to do one fucking thing.
What the fuck.
What, should I print big fucking A2 formated poster and stick next to my workstation "If you came here to interrupt me, think if you really need to"?
E:
And no, I dont know where the fuck is your excel file.
And no, I dont give a shit when Im coding that there is cake avail for workers today.
And no, for fucks sakes I dont have time for chitchat, I have deadline on me once again and Im doing something I dont have much expirience in so please leave me fucking alone.7 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
a bet:
this birthday, i will get:
lemon glutenfree cake (if any) because mom can't have gluten and sister likes lemon cake. i hate both of those. but that's irrelevant as it always was.
if any, then gifts will be anything except cigarettes which is basically the only thing within price range they're willing to spend, that i would actually be happy about.
birthday is just an artificially glorified ordinary day. and i'm not the type to do hysterics to artificially glorify it. and it's fine. but then, why are they artificially glorifying it while unwilling to actually glorify it properly, as in, glorify it for me?
pick fucking one. artificially glorify it, in which case, FOR ME, or just don't give a fucking shit same as i don't.
but why are you artificially glorifying it for the purpose of ignoring me and glorifying everything exactly in spite of me, without even being aware that you're doing that?
like seriously, what? make your "i love not you, but my daughter" day, as an extra to her birthday. i don't give a shit, i'm happy you have a nice relationship. but doing all of the "i love my daugther day" shit on my birthday, AND PRETENDING IT WAS DONE FOR MY BIRTHDAY, FOR ME, and being sad about me being sad that all you did "for me" was in fact for yourself and for everyone else, that's the combo that gets me.
"oh why u making me so sad by being so sad that i ignored everything you like and kept telling me you like for the past X years and i just ignored it because it's not my nor your sister's preference?"
guess why, you fucktard. how about you ignore the day next time instead of making it an unconscious (that's the worst, that they don't even realize it) mockery of the day.
"oh why are you sadand shitty feeling that we made this bullshit ignorable "celebrate you" day about ignoring everything that celebrates you, and made it into the opposite instead? why are you so demanding and cruel?"
SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.
go have a walk with your beloved daughter and please ignore me as you always do.
just leave me the fuck alone.5 -
How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.
But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.
And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.
I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!
But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.5 -
TLDR; College group projects suck, not because the work, but the people in your group will make or break you. Fuck having 1 week to do this assignment.
Sometimes working with other students on group projects is great, they actually know how to create a merge a git branch. I've had a decent partner once during my 3 years at university so far. This last project takes the cake on idiots I've worked with...so far at least... It was me and two others, we'll call them Thing1 and Thing2 for now. Anyway so the 3 of us had a week to implement a very rudimentary Invoice system; fine, easy enough. We divided up the work and 'started'.
All seemed to be going well, no complaints or cries for help all week. Until 4 hours before we submit the assignment; Thing 1 sends me a DM saying all of Thing 1's work is useless full of bugs and just shouldn't be integrated with the rest of the code. Umm fine? I guess? wtf?! why did this have to come out last minute?! We could have explained to Thing 1 what's going on and gotten him/her up to speed on everything. Believe it or not, I was sorta ok with this? I mean thing 1 hadn't pushed anything to the repo yet. I mean literally nada, Thing 1 is a collaborator on the repo that has contributed nothing. Seeing as how Thing 1 was contributing nothing I had already started to cover our ass a began Thing 1's work.
That's not even what's pissed me off... at least thing 1 had the gall to message me to say "idk..wtf is going on...continue without me". Thing 2 arguably made my time with the project worse. His code was nothing but garbage...every time...literally spent more time deciphering his incoherent bullshit more than I did rewriting his mess. I shit you not he wrote out this method, and tells the group he's "finally got it fixed and working":
public static float updateTotal(float newValue)
{
total = updateTotal(newValue);
return total;
}
How tf did he test this to see if its working?! I'm a novice and can already see the infinite loop here. You called your method within that method's own definition, what did you expect to happen.
I managed to get things 75% working and turned in 5 mins before the cut off.
Thankfully Thing 1 emailed the Proff as well, hopefully he won't tank my grade too bad. I'm so glad to be done with this assignment, fingers crossed there's no more group work.4 -
We were 4 dudes developing this little disposable material management system for a course in college, and we had to write documentation and present on the last day of class. Second week into the course and one dude goes rouge, not taking phonecalls nor replying to messages, just goes to class and does not get together with us to make progress. Neddless to say the other three of us had to do all the work. Fast forward to last day, all of us wondering where this dude could be. He shows up 6 mins before the presentation, already late, reads like 3 pages of the doc, and decides he will be the lead presenter.
>Mfw he takes over and starts bs'ing the whole thing.
>Mfw he mentions the possibility of the system to be extrapolated to manage salami in a butchery.
>Mfw the professor seemed to have swallowed all that bs like cake.
>Mfw we get an A, including him.
>Mfw I have no face4 -
LXC, no doubt.
I mean to be fair, LXC is an amazing container runtime once you manage to set it up. But setting it up is the hard bit. Starting off with LXC 2.x, it was a nightmare to find out how to get things like the storage backends working. But with ZFS it ended up being alright. Find some arcane values to stick in the /etc/lxc/default.conf to use ZFS as the backend and then the default storage location on those ZFS pools (I'll get back to that later), and it worked alright. Again, once it works it's great, but setting it up and finding the right configuration keys is absolute hell.
So, LXC 2.x for a while and a few months ago I finally ended up upgrading to 3.x. Every single configuration key changed. Every single one of them, and that's why I had to 1) learn LXC all over again, and 2) redeploy each and every one of my containers. That process is still not entirely completed. ZFS backend was once again a dive into arcane configuration keys found on forums and whatnot. Yeah.. official documentation has none of it. Oh and in 3.x you now also have to dodge the torrent of "just use LXD m8" messages. Yeah, very helpful when LXD is also the ONLY way to reasonably configure it. Absolutely beautiful. Oh and as far as the ZFS default storage location goes (such as ssd/lxc/ct)? Yeah forget about it. There's no configuration option for it anymore, and the default is "lxc". In ZFS lingo that means that LXC has the audacity to demand a whole pool for itself. No. No you don't deserve a whole pool for yourself. But hey at least you can define the storage location to use in the lxc-create command! Every single time you have to define it in lxc-create. I abstracted it away into my own LXC interface, so no big deal really. But yeah... That could absolutely be better. And in 2.x it was actually better.
Oh and btrfs, the filesystem I'd like to use on low memory systems because ZFS' ARC is too much on such systems? Yeah forget about it. I still have no idea how to do it. Thank you LXC and its amazing documentation!
And if you want the icing on the cake for LXC's terrible documentation, see their repo's index page at https://github.com/lxc/lxc/.... Yeah, it's totally still at 2.x... That's how well they maintain that. Even Debian has 3.x now. And if you look at the branches, you'll find that even 4.x is already available and considered stable. -
Being the only developer in your circle of non-tech friends is weird 😕.
And why are most female programmers not appealing 🤦♂️.
The beautiful ones are usually clueless and can't get into a ”deep programming concept ”conversation.
I guess I can't eat my cake and have it at a time.19 -
So an update on my last health rant..
It's got off to a great start... not
My intentions were to go into NYC to walk around in Central Park.
I'm currently wandering around aimlessly in the park, taking a break..
On my way over though I passed a bubble tea festival that was happening...
Gotta get bubble tea now... *Bad* but easier it's so expensive.. They're price gouging!!!
*good? But more I want a drink... I have water but I want something tastier...*
**Sees Duane Reade, goes in no sole, too expensive**
** Sees McD...pass... sees sign saying any large drink for $1**
...
I'm now waking in CP while drinking a large Sprite.... and I want cake bc I'm already in NYC goddammit... might as well get some as it's in the way... And I won't get another chance until.... **Some far away date** ( I know is probably not true...)
Help?1 -
"We've got a new opportunity for you."
I'm a fucking rookie. I didn't know the meaning of this sentence. Suddenly, I become the "IP PBX expert" of the society.
"-Okay, it's some networking shit, I thing I'm good at networking shit. Piece of cake.
-Okay great, you have one month to learn how this thing works, because we WILL provide this kind of service."
Damn.
I spent one month learning this shit on my free time, printing RFCs and living in the fucking MATRIX to not fuck up on the very first day doing that, just in case something on the customers' network fucks with the PABX or something like that.
Oh yeah, I forgot: I'm paid 80% of the minimum wage because I am actually not qualified to do my job and I'm spending one week a month to learn how to IT (some french weirdness I think, if not, maybe it's the germans' fault. Also yes, 100% legal).
Today, they announced me that they "changed their mind".
I'm pissed.1 -
Went on this 2 day business show...
Next to me a 100 inch tv... 4k quite awesome jittery video at points ? Codec or cable is wrong...
What was on the right of my stand ... To the cake.
"How to make money online"
He proceeded to state things like I now have 20mill my dream car etc ...
*Me trying not to laugh\be disgusted*
His power point ... Well a 10 year old can do better looks built in 1995
People were buying into it ! How the fuck does someone who has apparently 20mill give such a shit design to people and they listen...
I seriously wanted to go on and say... Don't listen to this fraud this, piece of shit snake oil salesmen.
But I didn't... And.. I regret it. On the bright side ... My stand had the shortest setup in the whole place bet by far the best websites! -
Totally not dev related but had to ait this somewhere... Yesterday my parents came to me and asked what the best way would be for them to have some space cake...
Totally caught me by surprise! Was so surprised I couldn't utter actual sentences for a solid 5 minutes...8 -
i have an idea today for find job as Junior:
First of all, startups usually hire senior devs only for two reasons:
1) is critical to their business, they need people that will ensure the project will be done no matter what, seniors usually brings that to the table.
2) The startups that raise some founding, usually have 100k+ raised, that money is basically enough for hire Seniors for some time without troubles, taking into account they will usually be highly profitable in the mid term, it is not a big deal to take the risk
Today startups, at least the most interesting ones, play the game in God Mode due to that founds raising, it is like having a max level character in some MMO with insane amounts of gold, you will buy only the best gear with that gold, not the low level gear, why you want to buy low level stuff, if you can buy the best of the best? that is why Juniors are not likely to have a place in startups, they can pay the Seniors.
But, there a situation in what an startup will wish to hire some Juniors, this is situation is, when they have never raised founds, they have no Cheat Mode, this ones are usually startups that have just few weeks or months of being created, and they need the MVP ASAP, this startups usually already have one or two Mid/Senior level engineers, but they have a very highly benefit from having a Junior in their team, this guy will no take any part in the Cake, will only work for lot less money and will discharge some stuff from the Seniors (Taking into account that is a minimum competent Junior).
Here is where Juniors can get jobs, at least for start their careers, and taking into account that thousands of new startups are created every year, this is a major market.
Ok, i already test that this approach if viable, i send requests to 5 startups that meets the conditions, and got response from 4! still not make a deal, but this is a lot more than 0 response after 2 dozen of applications to more stablished startups.
What you think about this? maybe this is just the jobless syndrome attacking me fuck8 -
Me *looking at the project* : it won't be difficult, it's going to be piece of cake.
Me *really reads more about it* : maybe it's not what I thought
Me *now doubting myself* : Google has all the answers
Me : runs to Google for something as simple as a while loop😩.1 -
— You and other scientists like you., — my sister said after tasting a half cake half cookie, made with wall mold instead of yeast. — You liked to say “no fate”, implying each one chooses their own path as science liberated them. People are equal. You’re right though: they are. They’re equally fragile and meaningless. They indeed have no fate; not because of freedom, but because the bomb you made will obliterate everyone on this planet. There will be no survivors. No fate indeed.
— Wait, but…, — I replied.
— Now go. Lay down in an empty hall somewhere its not real, generated procedurally. You dying there will maybe make me forgive you.2 -
you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?
noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few
but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.
example.
if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.
and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.
if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.
i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.
there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?
the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.
and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.
everything is so backwards in this country.
people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'
or
'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'
or
'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'
its pretty gross as are these people
well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people
took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.
still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?
I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.
I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.
i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.
and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.
there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.
starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.
everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.
the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.
so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.
years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.
don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.
I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.
oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.8 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD. -
Jr a little low while trying to do some stuff. Took down the prod sql server for a while. Some disturbance but not the end of the world but she’s a little low.
I am like: GREAT WORK!!! NOW YOU ARE LEARNING!!! 💪
Time for cake and celebrations!1 -
We're doing single login with Azure AD for a Java-based site. We need to also sync the user changes with a microservice.
Now, here comes the fun part: Microsoft is working on a new API which looks promising, which they recommend to use as they've migrated their resources there. But this new API has SDK for a ton of languages but Java, so that's a no-no. On the other side, the js sdk for the old API is borderline unusable and has no deltas (which we need to sync users), although the new one is pretty good.
As a cherry on the cake, applications created with the old API are not transferrable to the new one, but it is otherwise. This is detailed in a very small section of their labrythinc docs and I'm really hoping that this is true or we're thoroughly screwed.
Alas, Microsoft, you've disappointed me again!2 -
It's not a real dev regret but it's related to it: Not being able to fix a price or a value for my skills.
It's a real regret.
Just coming out of college I have tried my hand at freelancing at found it real hard to fix a value for what work was offered because I just found it weird to fix a monetary value on something that I've done for free for my entire life ( at school and uni I mean).
To make it worse my first experience was with a grad student who wanted me to complete her project.
Now being from India, I know that we have a stereotype of doing work for a lower price.
But this girl took the cake.
She wanted me to create a custom Image classifier using tensorflow.
It had to train with live images and then detect those images in the live video feed.
It's quite simple but still training the basic network(which would be used to just detect features) would take a decent amount of time and effort.
No pre trained models was also a prerequisite for her.
After hearing all her requirements I asked her what price she was willing to pay.
She said 50$ lump sum.
Being really confused as to what to say to that I just stopped replying.
To this day I have no clue what would be a reasonable price to quote a client like that.
After that I just continued dealing with people I knew personally and am currently doing that as an internship. But entering the proper freelancing system again has become a kinda weird thing in my head now, since I have no clue as to what price to put on my skills.
Is there any advice that any of the more experienced people would give?
Also consider the fact that I'm relatively fresh out of college and have no corporate experience.
Even if you've read my rant and have no advice it's okay. I guess this is a path of self realization after all.3 -
Aka... How NOT to design a build system.
I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.
SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.
If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.
Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.
Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...
Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.
Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.
No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.
Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.
Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...
Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.
http://lihaoyi.com/post/...
If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.
Again - keep. it. simple.
Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.
Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.
Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...
Which brings me to the CLI.
If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?
If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation
It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.
Last point: Plugins and versioning.
I love plugins. And versioning.
Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.
Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)
Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.
In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...
I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.
Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.
That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.
-.-5 -
Don't you just hate it when there seems to be nothing but in some ways lacking solutions to a definite task in your capability arsenal? Or rather, I don't really know how I should feel about it... I've been developing this solution to receive a 3DES encrypted Azure Service Bus message, decrypting it and chewing the output XML down so as to be digestible to the PHP application whose API the message gets delegated to... but there just seems to be no perfect solution: subscribing to the event topic straight from the target app just... doesn't seem to work properly, a Python implementation.... well, let's just leave it at that... a Node.js implementation would require TS and completely rewriting a proprietary library with 100+ complex types - also, there's some hiccups with both the subscription and the decryption...
I started with an F# implementation (after deeming the PHP one flawed), and it seems it's still the best. But goddamn it I had problems with it on the dotnet core side of thing (decryption output incorrect), so I had to switch to dotnet framework... Now finally everything crucial is peachy, but I can't seem to be able to implement a working serialized domain model pipeline to validate the decrypted message and convert it to something easier to digest for the target application (so that I could use the existing API endpoint instead of writing a new one / heavily modifying the existing implementation and fear breaking something in the process...). I probably could do it in C#, I don't know, but for the love of Linus I'm not going to do it if I can avoid it, when implementing the same functionality I have now without the Dto and Domain type modules would take 3x LoC than the current F# implementation incl. the currently unused modules!
And then there's the problem of deployment... I have no idea what's the best way to deploy a dotnet framework module to an app completely based on MAMP running on a mostly 10yo AWS cloud solution. If I implemented a PHP or Node.js solution, it'd be a piece of cake, but... Phew, I don't know. This is both frustrating, overwhelming and exciting at the same time.7 -
I have been having one of those days, well weeks where new concepts that would have otherwise taken a few hours, to learn and implement are taking days !! I don't know how y'all consistently learn new things and implement them, while still meeting deadlines.
My team usually holds weekly progress meetings where we discuss completed tasks and the following week's tasks. During the last meeting, I hadn't completed anything worth noting and I had no major reason other than, not having fully understood the concept.
Which is embarrassing because everyone else had done something.
I know, I know, I shouldn't compare myself to others but we all know my boss does. I don't blame him though, I mean I always pick the cake with more icing, and that's just food!
I don't even know what to do about it anymore!!! Is this a phase? Is it normal? What do people do about it? wait it out?3 -
#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators
I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day
With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)
It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.
BUT!
These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.
Whew
You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie
I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course2 -
So, if anyone remembers my previous rants (or otherwise), the app I'm working on is finally going to release. We release in about a week and a half, despite having at minimum 10 days work + testing (not including all testing of aws migration that we still haven't fully completed) to even have an MVP.
This is all because the clients have been pushing a release date (16th July) in marketing. Oh, and the icing on the cake? Our boss agreed for a submission to app stores (back-end pending) on Friday (yes, in like 3 days) instead of the agreed next Wednesday date.
Side note: the client is coming over to our office for Thursday and Friday. Why? We are unsure. -
This is not dev related but oh man after 2.5 years i heard back from them that they apologize and so i apologize them back for being rude. So here goes the story:
It was my first time visiting my father in law's aunt by myself for some specific reason that i forgot (perhaps maybe about fixing her son's motorcycle, but im not sure). Short story, when the job's done i was invited to dinner and they came out about all of their food is organic, i asked why. And they answer they didn't like chemical processed food, then i instantly said somethings like : "well do you put Natrium(Sodium in english) Hydrogen Carbonate in my cake?" And they looked a bit irritated and said "of course not, i wouldn't.why would i poisoned you" And i replied "hahaha i was messing with yall, but yeah i think you put NaHCO3 hahaha" And i instantly got kicked out. And i haven't heard them back until now. And they figured it out it was Baking Powder. It's not directly to me tho, they sent their apologize thru my mom. But still. I haven't laugh a lot for a while 🤣4 -
floating point numbers are workarounds for infinite problems people didn’t find solution yet
if you eat a cake there is no cake, same if you grab a piece of cake, there is no 3/4 cake left there is something else yet to simplify the meaning of the world so we can communicate cause we’re all dumb fucks who can’t remember more than 20000 words we named different things as same things but in less amount, floating point numbers were a biggest step towards modern world we even don’t remember it
we use infinity everyday yet we don’t know infinite, we only partially know concept of null
you say piece of cake but piece is not measurement - piece is infinite subjective amount of something
everything that is subjective is infinite, like you say a sentence it have infinite number of meanings, you publish a photo or draw a paining there are infinite number of interpretations
you can say there is no cake but isn’t it ? you just said cake so your mind want to materialize something you already know and since you know the cake word there is a cake cause it’s infinite once created
if you think really hard and try to get that feeling, the taste of your last delicious cake you can almost feel it on your tongue cause you’re connected to every cake taste you ate
someone created cake and once people know what cake is it’s infinite in that collection, but what if no one created cake or everyone that remember how cake looks like died, everything what’s cake made of extinct ? does it exist or is it null ? that’s determinism and entropy problem we don’t understand, we don’t understand past and future cause we don’t understand infinity and null, we just replaced it with time
there is no time and you can have a couple of minutes break are best explanations of how null and infinite works in a concept of time
so if you want to change the world, find another thing that explains infinity and null and you will push our civilization forward, you don’t need to know any physics or math, you just need to observe the world and spot patterns10 -
Badly lahmayo eggsdee
Jokes aside, while I am a sociable person, I don’t feel the need to go and hang out with my friends - and they don’t demand I do either. I’ve been just fine with the daily interactions at school and that sort of stuff, so the balance is already biased for me. I do however hang out a lot on Discord in various communities and enjoy the social interaction I get from there as well.
As a result, the dev life takes the bigger piece of the cake, but in my case it’s not a bad thing. Which is how it should be at the end of the day - do what feels best for you. -
Worst / best feature of any language:
Lack of / requirement of strict / dynamic / weak / strong typing. Just typing. Typing typing typing just typing.
Having to specify the type in C/++/#, Java/Kotlin is so annoying and delays the project so much by having to do declare weird classes with 3 or 4 fields just because you need it in this tiny line of code.
Not having good type support in JavaScript and Python is a pain in the eyes when you can't find what type each variable is, or when you pass a wrong argument to a function, and when you do, it shows the definition for the type in a .ty or.pyi file and not the definition itself which you have to find elsewhere. Spent half of my uni exams trying to decipher the type while it could've been a piece of cake if you just knew the type.
Love / hate relationship 😝1