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Search - "not a dev sin"
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Since my first high salary dev job in 2018 and until 2021, despite all my attempts to explain, my mom thought that I’m not actually a programmer but rather a scammer that just makes companies pay me salary for nothing. The argument that being a legit programmer is way easier than being a scammer mastermind fell on deaf ears.
Do you know why I said she thought so until 2021? Because I stopped talking to her in 2021 when she said that “being bisexual is a sin” and “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming out.4 -
In fact I'm a sinful dev, so that I can't easily decide which one is worst. From indenting with tabs, or using nano instead of vim/emacs, to hardcoding database credentials on server, to many hacks and workarounds I use as actual "fixes" when the deadline is upon me and I've tried all I could. But it always led only to my own regret. For instance, my latest sin was that I prefered Debian over Arch and used proprietary graphic drivers to speed up my new setup. But ended up with a curse from St. Ignucius. (check my last rant)
But my worst sin probably goes to when I was "printf-debugging" some issue for a GSM controller on a raspberry pi. I forgot to remove one little print line and deployed the new "fixed" version. I didn't follow that project after that for like a month or so, when the client posted back the device and said that "it just doesn't work anymore". It seemed that raspbian didn't boot beacause the sd card was curroptted. I dd'ed through the card and I noticed that there are billions of lines of "DEBUG:: reading stream from 192.some.shitty.ip", took almost all over the 32G sdcard. Just as I suddenly remembered the cursed line I just added a month ago, I declared the sd card dead with no hesitation, dunce-commented the line (so the history would remember), implemented a time out for the thread containing it, setup a journald unit for my service and removed the redirection of process output to a log file, found a new sd card and installed everything again, and finally posted back the new "fix" to the client.
Moral: Never comfort yourself for the sins you have commited in the past kids, they certainly will come back to you. And also not to do any io especially write to a file on an SD card with ext fs, in a potentially infinite loop with no timeout.
P.S: I'd posted my last rant just before the new week rant last nigh. I really liked the St. Ignucius meme so decided to create a new one. He's very adorable :)1 -
My first dev project was making a small 3D engine in GameMaker 7 when I was 14. I had been using gamemaker for two years then but I never got past the "platformer movement and collisions" and "top down movement and collisions"
It was the first thing I made myself without following a tutorial and spend quite a few afternoons at school to ask my Math teacher to explain things like sin cos and tan. Words I saw on the internet but did not understand.1 -
my worst dev sin:
Commit and go home on a friday not waiting for the build to pass.
Tons of notification from counterparts the following monday1 -
When I started at my company I was full of energy and wanted to improve the whole codebase. After years of getting blocked by new projects with deadlines month short of the actual time required and missing a lot or all important bits (texts, images. you name it, it's missing) I kind of have up.
I do refractoring now and then but it's not as extensive.
My biggest sin was a nested for-loop that I came across (50+ times nested, previous dev really loved c+p).
I looked at it and started to write the recursive function but stopped half way through, fixed that one error I'm the loop somewhere around 30 levels down, committed and made myself a coffee.
I hate myself to this day for giving up.
Shit I'll just factor that loop tomorrow3 -
Biggest sin
Due to lack of time, I named all the variables in my project without logic,
Like temp1,str1, function dojson etc
Lord be with the dev who's gonna work on that project
PS I am not a bad person, it is the time that made do such things -
I might have just git-committed the cardinal developer sin: not multiplying estimates by 3. Torvalds help me!
So a php app I developed a few months ago when I was first starting as a dev needs an upgrade. Pretty simple since I've known about said upgrade for a while, but the feature was never needed until today.
Told my boss it would take a day or two of refactoring and additions for it to work.
How screwed am I?4 -
My biggest dev sin is premature optimization. I'll try to produce the best possible code without the need for it to be there. I will waste my time thinking of wierd edge cases that can be handled with a simple if-else, but why not tweak the algo to handle them internally.
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From the day I was born,
Till the day I'll die!!
Every action that I perform,
Is a party if my sin!!
This may not be story of a Dev,
But this is the story of mine!! -
As my first dev job, I took over role of solo programmer maintaining all kinds of custom-made software used by local ISP. It was about 10 years ago.
My first question was where can I find test environment and repo. Apparently there was none and I should learn and develop on production.
My sin was to quickly give up on setting up both test and repo.
My second sin was to continue using the same copy&paste PHTML with register_globals enabled, building over it without attempting to refactor it with templates. I did not use globals in any new code at least.
And I suppose my third sin was that I was playing games when I was done with my tasks. I could have used that time to refactor a bit.
But I think in the end I was absolved from them since I was the only one suffering from this. I stayed with company until it got sold and helped migrate data over (along with myself). -
I personally don't have a funny dev sin story (not that I didn't commit any).
My internship colleague should update a value of a row in production. So he wrote a SQL command and forgot the where clause. This was the first time the company tested there rollback mechanism and it didn't work. For the next 2 weeks my colleague was busy updating 2000ish rows to make it work again