I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

Wholesome anti-rant.

There’s this Indian chick at work that I really, really do not get along with. Fortunately she’s on a different team so we have practically zero interactions. Her code was always decent, maybe upper junior level? but I went away fuming almost every time we talked.

However, I did a release security review today (I’m down from five/six per month to one) and read through quite a bit of her code. It was clean and easy to read with good separation, clear naming and intentions, nothing was confusing, etc. It was almost beautiful. Had I any emotions I might have shed a tear. I sent her a message and let her know :) I actually learned a better way of doing a couple of things from it.

She has grown so much as a dev.

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

Time for an actual rant:

During an internship I heard from my PM that my assignment for the week after was going to be working on a specific sql query to add some features and fix some bugs.

When talking with colleagues about that assignment later, they laughed and referred to the query as the "query of doom" (QoD), naive as I was back then, I thought that one of my colleagues had the QoD displayed on his screen because the query he was working on looked rather large (about 20 lines). They all laughed and told me I was in for a treat.

Starting my assignment the week after I was horrified to find out the QoD was huge, and by huge I mean, printing that specific query resulted in 8 A4 pages font size 10, front and back.
There were over a 100 union statements, no proper aliases, no documentation, not a single foreign key in the entire database, naming that makes no sense. And everything written manually by 10 different developers over the past years, who all fell of the face of the earth.

And this was only the query of doom. The entire product was a complete clusterfuck of forms with a queries directly behind action buttons, because we weren't allowed to make classes (yes you read that correctly. We couldn't make classes, unless we had a very compelling reason). Everything was created by over 30 different devs who only managed to stay just long enough to get some work done.

And all of this was the result of a PM who didn't believe in frameworks, ORM's, OOP, classes, ... because that made the software slow. To this day he still manages that product, but I'm glad that I quickly decided to move on.

Dear coworker: oh my god we aren't in highschool algebra; using "x" as the name of a parameter makes me want to cut you.

It's not that I hate PHP, I just hate the lack of consistency in standard function naming and parameter order, nonsensical attribute access, nearly-meaningless comparison operators, reference handling, case (in)sensitivities, and more!

I mean, look at these functions:
strtoupper(...)
bin2hex(...)
strtolower(...)

And look at THESE FUNCTIONS:
array_search($needle, $haystack)
strpos($haystack, $needle)

array_filter($array, $callable)
array_map($callback, $array)
array_walk($array, $callable)

And let me jUST USE SOME ATTRIBUTES:
$object->attr = "No dollar sign...";
Class::$attr = "GOD WHY";

HOW ABOUT SOME COMPARISONS:
(NULL == 0) // true
(NULL < -1) // ALSO true

Functions AREN'T CASE SENSITIVE (at least variables are).

Wanna dereference? TOO BAD, YOU'LL HAVE TO GET OUT THE TNT.

Alright, yeah, I hate PHP.

Hello, I just want to let you know I'm working on a 15 year old product and it is currently in production.

It uses Angular.js and one of the earliest versions of React.js. I cannot use ES6, we don't have Babel, no JSX syntax, no CSS preprocessor. No webpack.

I must support browser since IE6 with an ES3 syntax. (luckily I got some some polyfills for an ES5 syntax)

When I build a component I have to call React.createClass and React.createElement.

The render() function is basically a nested pile of React.createElement.

There is no documentation for this product, no tests, no anything.

I had to reverse engineer it in order to understand how it works.

The code base uses mixed programming styles and naming conventions, plus thousands of little js files.

Oh and obviously no hot reload, every time I make a change I have to restart everything.

Please, send help.
I'm in danger.

Sincerely,
An underpaid developer

....
I'm not crying, you are crying...

Stupid bloody PM.

I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.

But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.

When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.

Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!

And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!

Asdfjskldf.

How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?

The hardest part of programming is not the inner workings of the chosen frameworks and tech.

It's the damn naming.

I will spend hours trying to figure out what to name things for sense and clarity and then a fraction of that time coding it together.

*me, staring out the window*

"Hey dude can you--"

"Ssshhh. I'm naming things."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------

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

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

Shower Thought :
I wonder, in the future, since people is easily offended by everything, variable naming would be such a concern it'll be seriously implemented in the compiler, and be like
"Error at 16:1 NamingConventionError : 'fuckThis' is not linear with our guidelines"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

i was asked to start a new project, and another dev was brought onto the team shortly after. as soon as he joined, straight away he started an entirely new project and worked on it through the whole weekend, then came back on monday and just sort of pasted his files into/over the code i had already started and was working on, with no regard for folder structure or naming conventions or anything. his work was even split between 2 almost identically named namespaces (both of which were completely different to the existing project namespace) and his shit broke everything i did in the first place. the cherry on top is that none of his work was even functional, it was purely dummy/mockup web pages that weren't linked to any sort of backend.

when i asked him wtf he thought he was doing, he kept saying "i didnt touch your code" and refused to acknowledge that pasting a project over a different project can break stuff, then said it "wasn't his fault that i'm slow and not keeping up". and just kept saying vague bullshit about how i have to do it his way because he "has more experience"

he had no idea what my previous experience was, he had never asked and i had never told him, he just decided that he had more experience than me.

i dug through the shit and found out that he didn't just break my work, he had actually purposely deleted it when he realised it was getting in the way of his spaghetti. i showed him the commit and confronted him with it and all the cunt said was "well the good news is, you know the fix" and kept trying to dismiss me in the most disrespectful ways he could think of. i eventually snapped at him (long overdue at this point) and told him that any experienced developer would not commit code that didn't even fucking compile, especially when they're the one who broke it, and that he needs to grow up. of course he then complained that i was being unprofessional.

our manager decided we should go with fuckfaces """code""" without even looking at the work either of us had done, purely because fuckface is older than me and that's how the world works.

in the end i just told my manager that i refuse to work with the guy and he could either take him or me off the project (guess who he picked) or i quit.

after a few months of the guy failing to deliver any of even the basic functionality that was asked for, the entire project got scrapped, and the dude just quit once everyone realised he was literally just larping as an experienced dev but couldn't accomplish simple tasks.

i never received an apology from anybody involved.

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?

Proud dev moment : as I was following the variable naming conventions from my company, I got to name a variable "l_o_tr" 💪

Before I took on my current position (internal transfer), I stated that for what my boss asked for I would need a small team.
He agreed to that and promised I would get 2-3 developers.
6 months after (with countless reminders) he told me I could train some people at one of our providers.
Turns out those guys were Java developers, even though I asked for C# (since our codebase is .net)
After a few training sessions, where concepts as source control were a big topic ("why not just copy the code to a new folder with _good_ naming?"), I gave them a test assignment.
After reviewing their code I just gave up. They cannot program. They don't understand concepts like scoping of variables. Concepts of separation of responsibility.

I told my boss this but I had to make it work with them.

I went to my bosses boss (Head of IT) with my resignation in hand, since I felt my boss didn't want to support me actually getting a team. After a few talks I was asked to "keep it cool" and wait until he presented his new organization.

Now my boss asked me for which skills new developers should have. To which I could just laugh at him and forward countless mails from the last 6-8 months asking for developers.

<Irony>I love my boss</Irony>

Opening somebody else's code(11000+ lines in 2 js files) only to find a 100+ "var a" declarations and naming conventions like var chart1, var chart2. Best part? Not a single comment. Even better? The one who wrote the code doesn't remember what does what.

The code is a freaking mess. Shared behavior, terrible variable/method naming, misleading module naming, dynamic polymorphic spaghetti, whitespace errors, no consistency, confusing even if you understand what the code is doing, ... . It should never have passed code review. It probably wasn't code reviewed.

The comments are sparse and useless. Quality level: // This is bridge.

The documentation does not exist.

Testing steps for QA are missing several steps, including setup, so actually using the feature is bloody challenging. If one thing is wrong, the feature just doesn't show up (and ofc won't tell you why).

The specs for the feature are outdated and cover only 4 of 19+ cases. And are neigh useless for those 4.

The specs for the report I'm fixing don't even check the data on the report; it just checks for one bit of data on each row it creates -- a name -- which is also the same on each row. gg.

The object factories (for specs) are a mess, and often create objects indirectly, or in backwards order with odd post-create overwriting to make things work. Following the factories is a major chore, let alone fixing or extending them.

The new type has practically zero test coverage.

The factory for the new type also only creates one variant -- and does so incorrectly.

And to top it all off: the guy who wrote the feature barely ever responds. If he does, he uses fewer words than my bird knows, then stops responding. I've yet to get a useful answer out of him. (and he apparently communicates just fine, according to my micromanager.)

But "it's just fixing a report; it'll be easy!"
Oh, fuck off.

Refactoring code of somebody who left and:

- Plagued the code with TYPOS (milions of them but ok I can live with those... to a certain point)
- Used global variables by default.... of course even where they're not needed
- Used comments only in parts of code where... well they're not needed, important ones are of course left out
- Did not indent code. 3..2..1... Did not FUCKING indent code properly and when he did... did WRONG!
- Instead of indentation he used commented line with multiple ==== signes.... so far top is 60 consecutive lines with olny ==== again no apparent pattern here
- Did not follow a fucking standard in variable naming... no camle casing... there are varaibles assigned multiple times to "temp" variables without no reason just for the sake of wasting resources on the system I guess

This is just the beginning of the review but I already want to change job, die, scream, cry... not in any specific order.

Sometimes I don't give a dam naming my classes since I know not a lot of people will see this. At least I'll make a dev laugh!

If naming classes, methods and variables in your (not english) native language seems like a good idea, please get another job.

You know what is at least equally hard as naming variables?

Finding fitting icons to button actions!

With some icons you rather confuse your users compared to using no icon at all.
Others may fit the button text but not the context in your use case.

And there are so many icon sets out there that you need to search for something and hope that you stumble upon a good one.

That moment you realise that naming classes by their XML data structure is not as practicle as you hoped it was... 🤔

1. Naming all variables with letters of the alphabets
2. Not indenting (screw tabs VS spaces, I could use anything here)
3. Putting all src files in one directory
4. Writing the entire code without using any functions
5. Writing code and asking me to fix linting
6. Asking why they should follow language style guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it's done.
finally.

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

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

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

I see too many back-end rants against front-ends.

Should we talk about table layouts, malformed html, programatically generated spaghetti wrong markup, css absurd class naming, infinite div wrapping (div-itis), awful usability, poor legibility, terrible typography, wrong color palettes and user-unfriedly design? To name a few horrors i've seen so far.

Some people won't admit that their contempt against HTML and CSS being 'not real code' actually hides their inability or unwillingness to learn it. Or they need the feeling of superiority.

dear api author at my company pt. 2:

If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.

And one of those arguments is an array.

THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.

I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.

I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.

Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.

Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.

He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.

PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.

If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?

Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.

You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?

And that's just style, conventions.

This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.

"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"

We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.

YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER

And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".

WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????

EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.

MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!

This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.

Last week our department drama queen was showing off Visual Studio’s ability to create a visual code map.
He focused on one “ball of mud”, vilifying the number of references, naming, etc and bragging he’s been cleaning up the code. Typical “Oooohhh…this code is such a mess…good thing I’m fixing it all..” nonsense. Drama queen forgot I wrote that ‘ball of mud’

Me: “So, what exactly are you changing?”
DK: “Everything. It’s a mess”
Me: “OK, are any of the references changing? What exactly is the improvement?”
DK: “There are methods that accept Lists. They should take IEnumerables.”
Me: “How is that an improvement?”
<in a somewhat condescending tone>
DK: “Uh…testability. Took me almost two weeks to make all the changes. It was a lot of work, but now the code is at least readable now.”
Me: “Did you write any tests?”
DK: “Um…no…I have no idea what uses these projects.”
Me: “Yes you do, you showed me map.”
DK: “Yes, but I don’t know how they are being used. All the map shows are the dependencies.”
Me: “Do you know where the changes are being deployed?”
DK: “I suppose the support team knows. Not really our problem.”
Me: “You’re kinda right. It’s not anyone’s problem.”
DK: “Wha…huh…what do you mean?”
Me: “That code has been depreciated ever since the business process changed over 4 years ago.”
DK: “Nooo…are you sure? The references were everywhere.”
Me: “Not according to your map. Looks like just one solution. It can be deleted, let me do that real quick”
<I delete the solution+code from source control>
Me: “Man, sorry you wasted all that time.”

I could tell he was kinda’ pissed and I wasn’t really sorry. :)

My boss sucks really hard at English... I would not have a problem with it if he didn't insist on naming methods and variables with a non-sense English that he thinks is right...

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

personalproject C++ codebase:
- Clean code,
- 1 class per file,
- naming conventions
- comments .
- No more than 10 files per folder

Work C++ codebase:
- 22 classes per file.
- Classname not the same as file name
- weird variable names CmdStng
- All files in one source folder.
- Source control from 20 years ago

Me every time I cannot find anything I wondering why it is in a different file on line 3574 inside another class with an unrelated filename

I'm a jr developer. I started off in automation testing and don't mind it but the testing codebase is cancer, doesn't follow basic Java conventions even basic naming conventions like camelcase, and the tests are super slow using hardcoded Thread.sleep(). Since the automation tests are not automated, I have to run manually. YES manually, every morning I wake up early at 7am to run the 2.5 hour long tests (7am because this before people get to work and when the application goes back online). I run this bitch and monitor them but most of them fail anyways. I also have to write a email report on the results which means I have to explain why shit is failing so I have to debug all this crap. This shit literally eats up an additional 2-3 hours of my work day everyday and the time is not even accounted for. ALSO, since it's running on my laptop, it makes my computer slow most of the day. If I have to debug, I can't have the browser be headless so fuckin chrome browsers be popping up every 2 minutes. I did this for legitimately 8 sprints until I decided enough was enough and bitched about it and the team told me I had no choice. I eventually got them to push towards automating it but it's still in progress so I'm still running this dumb shit. The contractors try to take advantage of me any way they can by giving me mindless bitch work they don't want and they know I don't usually say no since I'm a jr resource. I hate running the fucking automation tumor. Sometimes I go into the meeting rooms alone to scream.
I feel like I'm wasting my life away and not learning as much as I could somewhere else

Two weeks into our fresh new Android app my colleague decided to define 1dp dimension unit in dimens.xml:
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">1dp</dimen>

During my code review I asked him if there was no better name for it as it's simply overstating the obvious and does not scale well for other resolutions. He didn't understand what I meant so I said would you then define this for xxdpi
<dimen name="dimen_1dp">4dp</dimen> just because you need more padding on higher density screens?

Then he goes on for 10 minutes how he thought about other names (doesn't say which ones) and still decided to stick with this one.

I politely heard him out and made it abundantly clear that I disagree with that naming (not the value). And I also backed up my point by saying that what he did is exactly the same as defining a color in colors.xml like this:
<color name="color_FFFFFF">#FFFFFF</color>

Then he frowned and said (paraphrasing): Noooooooo, that is so wrong. I would never do that. It's not the same as what I have done.
Then he again started defending his point which probably would have gone for good 10 minutes except I literally bit my tongue and walked away from my desk hoping he wouldn't follow as I was dangerously close to punching him!

Fucking enganeers!!!

Ah.. the beauty of clean code.

I wrote a very cleanly written program two years ago. Proper variable names, not too many, right naming, right design pattern,.. Now I come back to it and I am able to instantly figure out the code again. It only took me half a minute.

The importance of clean code... that's something the industry needs to understand more. Well, then there's the money issue. lol

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

You may remember a super long time ago I double-buffered the Windows cmd.exe using c++

tl;dr, here it is in c!

Anyways, I was still learning c++ back then. It wasn't my first project in c++ but it was close and I ran into a lot of issues. The thing worked... but only if you didn't touch it.

Here's the same project (With a lot less bells'n'whistles) written in c. I used a different approach this time, and other than my function naming convention (Which, I honestly don't even know if it's bad or not!), I think this is some pretty solid code!

In the image you see the header file (I used as a summary of the code) and then three x's in a terminal. To do this, the code:

-Creates a ConsoleScreenBuffer handle
-Creates two CHAR_INFO buffers for drawing & displaying
-Draws three x's to the draw buffer
-Copies the draw buffer to the display buffer
-Copies the display buffer to the ConsoleScreenBuffer handle

I'm thinking about cutting out the middle man and removing the display buffer (which holds what is currently displayed) but I think it may actually be useful, and I don't know.

Anyways, I have no friends that understand this stuff so that's why it's here. Cheers.

I have discovered a fresh hell

Some guy I’ve never met or heard of in the office lobbed a comment at one of my *approved and merged* pull requests. He doesn’t say anything specific, only that my REST urls are not in line with naming convention. That’s all he says, and I’ve already walked the URL consumers through the code and given them the URLS.

I’m really annoyed that this guy won’t just say what he has in mind, but fine whatever this is a professional environment and developers are not known for being a diplomatic people. Let it go and get your work done!

I do some googling and find an obvious change that needs to happen- I implement it, open a new pull request and inform my URL consumers of the change.

This rando still isn’t satisfied and still won’t say what needs to change. I am on round 3 of this wonderful cycle and this guy is acting all fuckin HAUGHTY about it. “Here is a list of conventions I found googling, you should read them even if it takes 4 hours because it will benefit your career”

Sure dog you’re probably right on that one but we are in a professional environment and at this point you are holding up production so you can wave your dick around! Just SAY WHAT YOU MEAN SO WE CAN MAKE THE CHANGES AND GET OUR WORK DONE

Both apps I'm working on have legacy code:

iOS app has 100's and 1000's of lines of code with no documentation, no proper naming conventions and cut and pasted code off the net.

Android app has skeleton code from a Spanish taxi app + remnants of a funeral webcasting app, there's also the same no documentation, bad naming conventions and cut and paste code off the net.

The server is also as bad, it had methods that we're never used, I for one don't fully understand the server but from what I can see it's a mess.

I had a hard time understanding both apps and gladly majority of the modifications I made we're not including existing stuff, so I guess I just basically pilled my code onto of the already existing software.

I would have gladly started from scratch given the chance.

Wait a minute... something doesn't feel right around here, There's a certain someone missing from my devRant life again.

Enjoy your social leave.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.

This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”

From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.

Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.

When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.

Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.

Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.

Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.

It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.

Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..

Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”

So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂

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

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

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

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

Name a more iconic duo than web developers on help sites and having pissing contests over which modules they use instead of actually answering the question!

I've been a web dev/server admin for all of about a month now, and only known PHP for about a week of that, and the one thing really that grates on me isn't PHP's odd function naming inconsistencies or at times outright trash documentation, it's the other developers who, when asked a fairly straightforward question about why a mysqli function won't return something, demand you use PDO instead.

Please. I'm running a LEMP stack on a Raspberry Pi here, I'm trying to keep dependencies to an absolute minimum because the SD card is tiny, the Pi will catch on fire if it runs any hotter, and more dependencies are more potential points of failure. Just answer the damn question. I'm not going to install PDO for something I know I can do anyway just because it makes my code look slightly prettier.

Honourable mention to all you Node.js developers out there too, with your thousands of useless npm dependencies. I salute you.

It really irks me when I see 'web developers' and 'front-end developers' write CSS like a bunch of first-timers. Not considering hierarchy, specificity or even following a proper naming convention (who the fuck mixes camel case AND lowercase for class names?!) It's worse when you already have Sass or SCSS and they still write their style rules WITHOUT PROPER NESTING or keep using !important like it was a goddamn semicolon.

This is fucking basic shit for a web or front-end developer, and God help you if I ever conduct your technical interview and decide to ask you on a whim to write an Angular app WITHOUT USING BULLSHIT SYSTEMS LIKE CLARITY, ANGULAR MATERIAL OR BOOTSTRAP for your UI. But if you can explain to me the pros and cons between using CSS grid and flex, I'll be fucking impressed.

I wish these 'UI experts' I keep encountering would learn to build an optimal static site without a fucking framework or build manager before doing advanced shit, for the love of Jeebus.

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

When you're naming variables, it is not acceptable for them to be one character, especially when that character bares no relevance to the information it stores.

'f' is not a good variable name for an array of strings now, is it...

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

so i signed in into a new win 11 install a few weeks back. hadn't noticed until now, windows has been backing up all my new PC's files to one drive. all the junk and temp files too 😭. Completely messed up my organisation on onedrive 😭. Fuck whoever thought it would be good idea to backup documents folder into documents folder fromevery fucking PC. not naming what PC or user it came from. I'm so fucked cleaning up this mess. Motherfucking assholes.

On the side note, anyone have any idea how can i find out which PC or user a file was uploaded by in the explorer itself. ☹️

I guess most of the things I do are a bad dev habit?
From not commenting stuff to commenting in German to copying stuff without looking at it, procrastinating a lot, not starting at all, bad naming of variables, bad... Everything? Idk, I have a lot to learn

-not commenting
-leaving console logs behind in production
-not testing if it works in IE
-using root too much
-using if instead of switch
-never staying consistent with naming conventions
-starting projects and never finishing

MTP is utter garbage and belongs to the technological hall of shame.

MTP (media transfer protocol, or, more accurately, MOST TERRIBLE PROTOCOL) sometimes spontaneously stops responding, causing Windows Explorer to show its green placebo progress bar inside the file path bar which never reaches the end, and sometimes to whiningly show "(not responding)" with that white layer of mist fading in. Sometimes lists files' dates as 1970-01-01 (which is the Unix epoch), sometimes shows former names of folders prior to being renamed, even after refreshing. I refer to them as "ghost folders". As well known, large directories load extremely slowly in MTP. A directory listing with one thousand files could take well over a minute to load. On mass storage and FTP? Three seconds at most. Sometimes, new files are not even listed until rebooting the smartphone!

Arguably, MTP "has" no bugs. It IS a bug. There is so much more wrong with it that it does not even fit into one post. Therefore it has to be expanded into the comments.

When moving files within an MTP device, MTP does not directly move the selected files, but creates a copy and then deletes the source file, causing both needless wear on the mobile device' flash memory and the loss of files' original date and time attribute. Sometimes, the simple act of renaming a file causes Windows Explorer to stop responding until unplugging the MTP device. It actually once unfreezed after more than half an hour where I did something else in the meantime, but come on, who likes to wait that long? Thankfully, this has not happened to me on Linux file managers such as Nemo yet.

When moving files out using MTP, Windows Explorer does not move and delete each selected file individually, but only deletes the whole selection after finishing the transfer. This means that if the process crashes, no space has been freed on the MTP device (usually a smartphone), and one will have to carefully sort out a mess of duplicates. Linux file managers thankfully delete the source files individually.

Also, for each file transferred from an MTP device onto a mass storage device, Windows has the strange behaviour of briefly creating a file on the target device with the size of the entire selection. It does not actually write that amount of data for each file, since it couldn't do so in this short time, but the current file is listed with that size in Windows Explorer. You can test this by refreshing the target directory shortly after starting a file transfer of multiple selected files originating from an MTP device. For example, when copying or moving out 01.MP4 to 10.MP4, while 01.MP4 is being written, it is listed with the file size of all 01.MP4 to 10.MP4 combined, on the target device, and the file actually exists with that size on the file system for a brief moment. The same happens with each file of the selection. This means that the target device needs almost twice the free space as the selection of files on the source MTP device to be able to accept the incoming files, since the last file, 10.MP4 in this example, temporarily has the total size of 01.MP4 to 10.MP4. This strange behaviour has been on Windows since at least Windows 7, presumably since Microsoft implemented MTP, and has still not been changed. Perhaps the goal is to reserve space on the target device? However, it reserves far too much space.

When transfering from MTP to a UDF file system, sometimes it fails to transfer ZIP files, and only copies the first few bytes. 208 or 74 bytes in my testing.

When transfering several thousand files, Windows Explorer also sometimes decides to quit and restart in midst of the transfer. Also, I sometimes move files out by loading a part of the directory listing in Windows Explorer and then hitting "Esc" because it would take too long to load the entire directory listing. It actually once assigned the wrong file names, which I noticed since file naming conflicts would occur where the source and target files with the same names would have different sizes and time stamps. Both files were intact, but the target file had the name of a different file. You'd think they would figure something like this out after two decades, but no. On Linux, the MTP directory listing is only shown after it is loaded in entirety. However, if the directory has too many files, it fails with an "libmtp: couldn't get object handles" error without listing anything.

Sometimes, a folder appears empty until refreshing one more time. Sometimes, copying a folder out causes a blank folder to be copied to the target. This is why on MTP, only a selection of files and never folders should be moved out, due to the risk of the folder being deleted without everything having been transferred completely.

(continued below)

When you spend so much time using PHP that you start naming variables with $ in other languages without releasing.

bool $haha = true;
if (haha) ...
haha is not defined.

So in Germany we have something like 'cooperative study'. You are employed in a company and study 'normal' at a university. This is in 3 month phases, i.e. 3 months working, 3 months studying.

At the moment I'm working and there is a colleauge, that seems to have no high confidence in my programming skills.
Today I saw parts of his NodeJS code and I thought I'm going crazy.
No comments, no real usage of callbacks or at least promises and I dont want to talk about naming of the variables.
I caught myself arguing with this guy too often and always thought I'm the stupid one, that doesn't understand him.
But I'm starting to think, He is the one that is hard to understand.

How ever, I stay confident and also keep a nice tone (also help as much as I can) and sometimes we also have the same thoughts in some topicd. It's not that bad, but sometimes I feel underestimated.

But hey, so it's a bigger surprise if I'm presenting my results and show them what I'm able to do 👍🏻

So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash

So for almost all of my c++ assignments I've recieved various emails from the instructor about things like "incorrect header guard" and "library inclusions out of order".

The first being that I didn't include the namespace inside of the guard (I did "FILENAME_H" instead of "NAMESPACE_FILENAME_H")

The second is that I accidentally included header files from my project before any of the standard libraries. This one wasn't even intentional, it was caused by vscode when it formatted/prettified the file.
EX:
#include "test.h"
#include <iostream>

In my opinion these seem pretty nitpicky and, especially that first one, appear to be more like naming conventions or best practices than something to deduct marks for.

On the flip side though I did accidentally store a couple functions in the global namespace which I understand isn't particularly safe. I also made a couple one line conditional statements that simply never evaluate to true, but I didn't think this was a huge deal.

I don't normally code in any of the c languages outside of college so I'm not sure how important these are to actually follow. I've apparently been deducted an entire 10 percent off the assignment because of the head guard. I know that every professor has different criteria for deducting marks, but even this seemed rather unnecessary.

What does everyone think?

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

When it is 645am Friday and you spent the whole week with meetings and tasks and sleepless nights.

You just cannot give a tiny rat ass about the naming of routes and functions.

DO NOT ask me about my variable names!

My new favourite commit message:

"All changes as of 18th Sept"

How tremendously useful? There I was looking to know what changes were made to enable a feature / service, thought I could look for that in the commit message, but no you've given me a much more efficient way of finding out.

I simply need to download the contents of your memory, find out what date you made a change, and then dig through the massive commit to find the piece of info I need.

Forget experience using Git features, managing merges, following Git flow, or even any other SCM ... how can people be so tick when it comes to recording what they've done.

Heres a little cheat sheet for those struggling:

- Commit message
Describe what you actually ****ing did. Don't tell me the date or the time, thankfully Git records those. Don't tell me the day of the week, if I need to know I can figure that out, just tell me what ... you ... did.

- Feature branch names
Now this is a tricky one. You might be surprised to know that this isn't in fact suppose to be whatever random adjective or noun popped into your head ... I know, I too was shocked. The purpose of this is to let other people know what new feature is being worked on in this branch.

- Reusing feature branches
Now I know you started it to add some unit tests, and naming it "testing" is sort of ok. But its actually not ok to name it testing when you add 3 unit tests ... then rip out and replace 60% of the business logic. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create a new feature branch, given you are now working on a new feature.

Tried to reply to @Fast-Nop who had replied to someone wondering if C would be a good first language.

IMHO C should have been put to sleep ages ago. A few years ago I downloaded the latest, greatest C Standard. For a language billed as small and simple (by many) it was over 800 pages long. Still there's a lot that's unspecified like order of evaluation of function arguments. Int etc is implementation dependent. And error handling, let's not go there. The macro assembler throws away all the semantics leaving behind a cryptic value. It's a complex language due to the innumerable interactions possible.

It's been called assembly language for the PDP-11 minicomputer. Recently learned that even the VAX-1 was built from SSI chips like the 4-bit 74181 ALU. The VAX.

Anyway I had several excellent books on programming style written by Henry Ledgard. He despaired of making C look readable. I commend his books which are so old that the code is UPPERCASE A lot of he wrote had to do with program design, naming things, writing good comments and that the visual shape of a program assists mental clarity.

How comes that people can write such fucking shitty code?

Because I mean, why the hell would I want a progress indicator while the form is loading?

Actually, let's just not disable the form while it's loading. Let the user get mad when it's data's overwritten.

And best of all. Let's use inconsistent naming and fucking metadata tables so that we don't have any structure and make queries slow.

Yes. I fucking love incompetent consultants. Fucking love them. Good thing he never got hired...

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

So my friend who is currently attending University to major in Computer Science just started programming Java a few days ago. His first assignment was to learn bubble sort and make it organize a table of certain values provided in the assignment with a few other items on the side. Apparently, he was stressing over the assignment and waited till the last night to do this, and was running on 2 hours of sleep. Anyways, a few days pass and he received a 0% on the assignment with the comment "See me on Monday." and questioned what he did wrong (They use GitHub to submit their assignments, even though other classes at the University just commit to the University Server for Computer Science), and asked me to review the code. When I started looking at the code, all he managed to do was just make two tables, one that would print the unsorted table, and then print the "sorted" table. Plus, the catch that got him in trouble, he named his package "fuckthisshit", how does one not realize that when they're submitting their assignments... like seriously? Like I can understand the 2 hours of sleep, but with 1000s of examples out there, how do you manage to fake bubble sort plus end up naming a package "fuckthisshit" and question why he got a 0%. I do feel bad for him in the long run since there aren't many assignments in this class so this was worth 25%.

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

The traits that compile to form a programmer

-Not good at naming things

-People started asking for you to fix electronics regardless of what you tell them You’re actually studying/good at

-Procrastination through the roof

-Lives off of Coffee, POP, Energy drinks, or what ever source of caffeine.

tl;dr; A co-worker and I had an disagreement on our package structure. They went straight to our team lead instead of trying to solve this in our team and by that letting me do my job.

Do I overreact by assuming that this was malicious?

A co-worker asked me to do their code review today. There was nothing really wrong there, mainly something a bad generator created.

However at one point we had a disagreement about the naming structure of the packages. We both agreed to disagree, so I thought we could bring that up in the next daily, as it's something the team should agree on.

Shortly after that, they told me on Slack, that they relayed the matter to our team lead to get their opinion. Wtf.

My role in the team is that of a technical lead. Even though I like to discuss such topics in the team and not straight up dictate decisions.

By going directly to our team leader, they basically circumvented the whole team. This really rubs me wrong the way.

Maybe I'm just overreacting?

I think companies are not going more and more woke but they are appeasing to the crybabies so their profits won’t diminish in the long term.

So they are doing something worse, knowing the demands of these highly offended crowd are bullshit but they prefer to look like they agree with them, so some retard do not start a twitter thread about how github supports slavery by naming default branch master.

In the meantime, this appeasement emboldens and make those children bolder demands, like a baby wailing inside a mall to force parents to buy a candy.

sensible naming stuff for readability? nah.. it's not like someone will read my code after i'm done here right?

It's always so funny when a person starts using multiprocessing in Python, because if there's "multi", obviously THIS is the thing that should free the person from a headache of having GUI frozen. You know, because it does "multiple" ehm... stuff..... at once....... yeah. And it's popular, it must work for me too! Oh how often I see this. :D

Stupidly enough that's not entirely a user's fault, but Python's as naming things with "multi" doesn't end up well basically with anything. I bet if there was such thing as multipointer in C half of the beginners would be totally fucked and the other one would just break their machines beyond repair with a joy.

Yet... reading the damn documentation should be a requirement before using threading or multiprocessing to prevent the confusion, because there's this funny difference between multiple threads and multiple processes which will haunt you unless you see what's what and use it correctly.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

Why do I have a hard time finding a new job when senior devs are not only changing the data model, but naming keys "key" and "value"!?
"Oh look, a SQL error."

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

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

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

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

Visual studio - not naming controls

My first time doing a pair-programming for uni assignment.
My partner is actually smart (a Mechanical Engineering guy), except when it comes to programming :
1. Don't know how to spell FALSE
2. Don't know how to create array in Matlab
3. Poor variable naming
4. Redundant code everywhere
5. Not using tabs
6. Stealing my idea and spit it again in my face after claiming it as his idea
7. Mansplaining every line of his code like I am a stupid person who never sees a computer before.

He said he has an experience in Matlab, wants to specialize in Robotics and taking several ML classes. What did they teach anyway in class to produce a shitty programmer like him?

Thankfully despite his being an arrogant shitty guy, he still manage to get our code to works.
That's good because if not, then I will happily push his head under water while slowly watching him drown.

🤨

So I’m working on this project I’ve been working on for like 3 weeks and I finally got this feature to work but it had a bug and I shit you not fighting this program was like playing through bloodborne for the first time again. It got to the point where I started naming the testing files swear words or stuff like “itshopeless”, “maybe”, “maybe2”, “pls”, etc but I finally after fucking hours passed, bug slaughtered. And I’m now exhausted

Any HTML / Frontend designers here who could share their opinion on the following:

A company project of mine is basically a document store with a (deep) folder hierarchy.

The deep folder hierarchy is not negotiable / changeable.

However my brain fries when I try to come up with a - mobile friendly / responsible - design.

There are ~ 10 - 15 root folders, having a maximum of 3 subfolders, so:

Folder 1 -> Documents
Folder 1 -> Subfolder of 1 -> Documents
Folder 2 -> Subfolder of 2 -> Documents
...

Any ideas on howto design something like that?

Was thinking about using a top navigation for the folders and then the rest of the screen for the document information...
But with 15 elements in top navigation it would be hard to navigate on mobile I think....

The naming and everything else ist managed by the customer.

Any ideas?

fuck the guy that writed the api that I consume at my company

he's not the worst guy ever, and he might be going through some stuff in life, or maybe he's just happy. There's no way to know actually.

but fuck him. fuck this fucking guy. fuck him with a thousnd dicks.

this guy defends his postures on the api like this thing was fucking sacred and masterly designed ok?

if I ask him to change one url's method from get to post so that I can send more longer data for the request, he comments "i cant believe they still haven't figured out a get request with a body". I appreciate him caring abkut the correctness.

but this is the same piece of shit that makes NOOO fucking validations on whatever I send to it. I get 500 for fucking EVERYTHING.

And if he does 400, the actual response messages are garbage, the same fucking text with no explanation.

FUCK YOU!!!!!!

I hate the way he structures the names of the url and the parameters, sometimes I have to send arrays of strings, other times arrays of objects, the naming is garbage and INCOSISTENT.

And when we asked him to do the API dotnet core, he was like "nah" FUCK YOU FOR USING SOON TO OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGIES!!!
THIS PIECE OF SHIT IS SLOW, because a coworker did another spi in core and the response times are hugely better.

I wouldnt mind if he was 100% of the time careless, but he actually makes a stand for his ideas, as if he actually gave two shits.

he's actually an ok guy though but... fuck hiim!!!! ive been holding onto this for a while... and I'm sure I have some flaws too.

How do you feel when in the middle of tight deadline, your client calls you and tells you that he has changed some little detailing in the requirements, like naming, color schema etc. This needs to be done within the deadline. You tell yes and tell him to send email.
After receiving the email, you find out it's not little it's bag of new features listing.
Now either you have to overwork or let the client go....

To all the masochists who spent hours debugging misspellings:

1. Learn your tools
2. Learn good practice

Every IDE should point out when you're not using a variable you've initiated or using an uninitiated variable as well as at least highlight, if not simply list, every occurrence of the variable under your cursor and let you find all references or even display the number of references next to a variable at all times, and finally, every IDE should autocomplete for you so when it doesn't you know you've messed up. Good IDE makes all the easy mistakes hard and all of the hard tasks easy. Including running tests. If you don't know how to configure your IDE to do all these things take time and learn it. If you still can't figure it out, replace your IDE maybe...?

Also use the debugger. Preferably one that nicely integrates with your IDE. If you don't, check point 1.

Also write tests and *run them*.

Also if your misspellings tend to consist of a missing `s` at the end of a plural noun just call it `entityCollection` instead of `entities`. And read up on more good programming practices and naming conventions.

PyCharm's Warning: "Function name should be lowercase for PEP8 naming conventions."

Do Python developers not like camel case function names?

I'm sorry to say this but if you keep changing your naming "convention" every freakin day it's not a convention

.........wHAT KIND OF FUCKING RETARD MAKES A WHOLE 300+ paGE FUCKING BOOK AND NOT NAMING THE PAGE NUMBERS???????? HOW THE FUCK CAN I FUCKING REMEMBWR WHAT PAGE I WAS READING AT SO I CAN CONTINUE FROM THERE NEXT TIME?????

I'm not really satisfied with any of the major smarthome systems out there, so I'm making my own and using it as a learning experience. What I've learned so far, is that I suck at naming...

Best thing I can come up with is EasyDIYHome....

Classmate: I'm done with this

I read his code

Me: Good. But could you make that a little bit more.. readable?

Classmate: Eh..what?

Me: Or use one or two lists less.. and the naming

Classmate: But I need them all!

It's a square around a coordinate within given borders, not rocket science.

longer rant, with curious question at the end;

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

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

Due to covid, mgrs decided to fire 10% but could not negotiate schedule increase with internal IT. With no promotions or hikes, few full stacks we have leave.
Now am working with 2 data engg doing cloud java microsvs work while learning. Their first delivery was applauded by their mgr who is under pressure to retain them.
I as arch review their code. No unit tests, print statements all around, shoddy exception handling, variable naming issues. We have Sonar by default in our build. They ignore the report. I ask them about it. Seems mgr told them he is getting a contract person from another team on part time basis to do/fix. I share my confusion.

Mgr calls me up and checks if we can put it as tech debt backlog and deploy to prod !!!

Not using proper naming schemes

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

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

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

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

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

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

So turns out I am making a blog about my attempt to make a Facebook but not clone for my wife and her friend. Any blog naming ideas? I am thinking "Facebook but Different" haha. The idea would not be sharing direct code, but more of a devlog and coding choices(as a backend dev, I am sure the front end choices will be perfect and Superior to all front end developers' choices 😁😁)

I'm thankful to Docker's founders for not naming it "DockerGo"

Started testing my most recent side project today... Renaming 1.1TB of movie files according to proper naming conventions over a 100Mbs network. Been running for 11hours already and not even a quarter of the way through

So at one point I worked on an inherited project that had the worst code I've ever seen. I mean bad, so bad there may no quantifiable measure that can accurately convey how bad. We ended up naming the thing 'the hydra', cause it had a million issues and they just kept growing as we fixed things. To my point, in C++ they implemented their own primitive type Boolean32 as a signed int32 pointer. If that wasn't enough they used it as an octal bit mask. They also switch the value using logical and / or between 2 numbers, 037777777777 and 000000000001. So essentially they only switch this value to 1 or -1 and end up comparing it to their own const true or false. In c++ any value not 0 is == true...apparently not in this code.

Why are more games or media platforms not encouraging the use of similar account naming conventions to Blizzards launcher or Discord.

The way you can have a name# with a 4 digit code pretty much gives you the ability to have 10k users with the same account name but still be unique.

Just tried PokeMMO which has been around since about 2010 I believe? Not only is their system shit with a 3 char limit and the inability to delete characters, but the game is so fucking old that I literally spent between 30-60 mins looking for a variation of my name that was both likable and available.

I've never designed a naming system like discords before, but surely its a better alternative to this shit?

So as a student developer with years of background in web development (including both front and backend), c++, java and c#, I was more than surprised when I found out my Informatics assignment hadnt received the proper excellent mark. In fact both me and a friend of mine who has been working with C++ in particular for years got a --mark.

// The assignment was the most simple Windows Forms Application with 2 buttons and a textbox

When we asked about that the teacher said we hadn't labeled the buttons and textboxes, though we had actually taken our time to put labels next to each UI element that would need usage directions.

Though what she meant was renaming the actual variable names, those being textBox1, button1 and button2.

We of course got really mad, because w both follow the accepted naming conventions for each of the languages we write in. Arguing was to no avail. Even telling her that variable naming was not in the assignment instructions was pointless as she said it had been self explanatory​..

The others for whom computers are powered by magic, did their assignments as they had memorized everything that teacher had shown them. Why? Because she didn't teach them how to code in the first place. So they copied what would work.

Fucked up educational​ system, sadly nothing new..

Oh and btw, the naming she uses and teaches students to use is:

button1 - btname
label1- lbname
textBox1 - tbyear

If not understanding code, read the documentation or debug the code. When trying to modify...
1. Follow proper indentation.
2. Don't make spelling mistakes and follow naming convention.
3. Don't try to write all the code in one line (based on line length set)
4. Simplify if else statements if possible.
5. If value of method call need to be used once, don't store it in a variable. Directly use where ever it is needed.
6. If there is duplicated code, put it in separate method and re-use it if possible.

Android devs, what are your thoughts about the naming conventions google tries to enforce on us, especially with the xmls?

I opened a new project after months of leaving android dev, and thought of trying the basic activity template with name 'myActivity'

On clicking it, a ton of files got created : myActivity, myActivityFragment ,... And in xml the reverse naming notation : activity_my, fragment_my, content_my,...

This naming is uncomfortable .in a large project, activities usually acts as complete modules in which different tasks are handled : logins getting checked, data being cached, database being accessed and much more...
So if my activity 'abc' has a content fragment and a toolbar whose design is in another xml, shouldnt the 3 of them be named like:
abc_activity.xml
abc_activity_fragment.xml
abc_activity_toolbar.xml

And not
activity_abc.xml
fragment_abc.xml
toolbar_abc.xml

??
At the very least , it would look nice since the components that are displayed together will have their files together. And i don't know much about testing, but i believe it would be helpful there too

Just starting with scala. And while I dig the more functional programming approach I am having the hardest of times dealing with naming higher-ordered functions, in my case a function returning another function.

Started out as `foo`, went through quite a lot of changes, and now it has become the beast: `createReplacePriceByPassengerConfigurationMapperFunction`. It won't stay that way but: GOSH! Naming. It's hard! Or I might as well suck at functional programmig. It's not like that these two things are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Automatically copying screenshots to clipboard has never been a good idea to begin with.

The screenshot feature since Windows 8, the full-page screenshot feature from the Firefox developer tools, and many smartphones automatically copy screenshots to the clipboard, which usurps the existing content of the clipboard If there is a clipboard manager (like on Samsung smartphones since at least the early 2010s), it usurps existing entries since clipboard managers only hold a limited number of entries. On Samsung's keyboard, that's twenty.

Thankfully, some other tools like gnome-screenshot for Linux make it optional. There is a "copy to clipboard" button on the file naming dialogue, but it does not happen unsolicitedly. This is the user-friendly way to do it.

Most websites and mobile applications do not support pasting screenshots from the clipboard anyway, only attaching them as file through a file picker or drag-and-drop gesture, making it pointless to copy screenshots to the clipboard. If I want to send a screenshot, I will attach it as a file.

Who the fuck thought that in react useState should return an array and not an object. It makes me wanna make a wrapper that would instead return {current, set} = useSaneState('fuck you') because what the fuck does it have to do with arrays. And an object with shit.current would be consistent with useRef.

Also, vue is just superior in naming and coding standards.

PM: there’s a bug could you investigate and fix this?
Coworker: *investigates*
CW: is this correct? *shows a totally different solution to what he was asked to* *naming a variable “fn”*
Me: but that’s not what you’re asked to do. You know it’s possible to do that right (the supposedly solution)
Cw: but that would have longer code
Me: (what?) 🙃

Wtf do you mean longer code?
Cw: shorter code > spec
Me: 🤦‍♀️
Cw: shorter code > readability
Me: 🤦‍♀️

I always liked to go through recruitment pipelines, to see what other companies do.

So today I had a meeting with a "talent recruter".

He asked to present myself, my history and what I did in the last three years... In 10 minutes...

So, obviously I did it in 20 mins.

The final response was "not good vibes, and synthesis problems".

WTF? How can I presente a big restructuration, recruting, process, formations, architectures in less thant 15 minutes... Did he wanted that I made drop naming.

Why Dart was designed with idiocy:

1) naming conventions are idiotic

Most other languages are smart enough to not throw errors when the variable name matches its type. And lots of others, for any lexemme - only 1 naming kind is allowed.

Fine. Oh wait, there's that thing called existing databases and GraphQL & other APIs, should they all adapt to this? No, because 2) is the bonus

2) String keys in objects. Unless it's a class with boilerplate, you write them as strings and access them as strings.

So here's the solution when you want to integrate Dart with existing services: write a lot of JSONSerializable decorators to fit with dart's pissy naming requirements.

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

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

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

Pick your favorite:
Postgres
PostgreSQL
Psql
PgSQL

And maybe more...

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

Work has started naming projects after chemical elements.

Dibs NOT working on the uranium or plutonium projects...

Why QA should never be left "in charge" of marking priorities on tasks before "demo day" deployment and client handover of a product.

New and refactored, key, features need to be deployed by "demo day", and most developers and the PM (not me) have already been re-allocated to new clients and projects. There's several things being done in paralell to get it done.

QA: We need to be able to download CSV files showing affected users if i do extremely rare action X, and this should pop up in the system for the first 24 hours after doing X.
Priority: High
New priority for feature Y: Medium
(Action X may never be used at all)

This is implemented, reviewed and deployed.

QA: I want a timestamp in the file naming, I'm experiencing duplicate files.
Priority: High
Feature Y: Medium

Develop, review and deploy timestamping for the CSV files.

QA: They are only marked with DD/MM/YYYY, I performed rare action X several times in one day, I can still get duplicate file names marked with numbers. This is #1 priority!
Priority: High
Feature Y: Medium

...Okay, this is nitpicking, this will never happen, but fine. Overtime to do the extra minor, minor adjustment, down to hours and minutes, get it reviewed and deployed at the end of the day.

QA: I managed to do rare action X 6 times in 1 minute, I have duplicate files. It needs to be down to seconds. This is top priority.
Priority: High
New priority for feature Y: Low
.........

Constant interruptions, moronic priorities and voicecalls throughout the entire day.
Dear QA, you can be fucking donkeys at times.

I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.

I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.

Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.

Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.

Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.

And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.

I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.

On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.

And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.

I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.

Objective-C syntax is more readable than Swift.

The verbose naming conversations feel natural in Objective-C, but in Swift they look rather nasty to me.

Also Swift syntax feels inconsistent in many parts of the language, which forces you to memorize when you can and when you can't use a certain feature (i.e where, case).

Am I the only one that thinks Objective-C looks a lot cleaner than Swift code?

Note: This is an opinion, not trying to start a war. Just curious if I'm alone on this.

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

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

> I could have guessed that

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

> OH no

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

> REEEEEEEE

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

> DAFUQ

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

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

> OHHELLONO.gif

> mfw I have to rename 1794 files by hand.

( Please send help )

nothing new, just another rant about php...
php, PHP, Php, whatever is written, wherever is piled, I hate this thing, in every stack.

stuff that works only according how php itself is compiled, globals superglobals and turbo-globals everywhere, == is not transitive, comparisons are non-deterministic, ?: is freaking left associative, utility functions that returns sometimes -1, sometimes null, sometimes are void, each with different style of usage and naming, lowercase/under_score/camelCase/PascalCase, numbers are 32bit on 32bit cpus and 64bit on 64bit cpus, a ton of silent failing stuff that doesn't warn you, references are actually aliases, nothing has a determined type except references, abuse of mega-global static vars and funcs, you can cast to int in a language where int doesn't even exists, 25236 ways to import/require/include for every different subcase, @ operator, :: parsed to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for no reason in stack traces, you don't know who can throw stuff, fatal errors are sometimes catchable according to nobody knows, closed-over vars are passed as functions unless you use &, functions calls that don't match args signature don't fail, classes are not object and you can refer them only by string name, builtin underlying types cannot be wrapped, subclasses can't override parents' private methods, no overload for equality or ordering, -1 is a valid index for array and doesn't fail, funcs are not data nor objects when clojures instead are objects, there's no way to distinguish between a random string and a function 'reference', php.ini, documentation with comments and flame wars on the side, becomes case sensitive/insensitive according to the filesystem when line break instead is determined according to php.ini, it's freaking sloooooow...

enough. i'm tired of this crap.
it's almost weekend! 🍻

I do not like rust's choice to just infer something from how it is named

like if you install a package that begins with "cargo-something" then it becomes a cargo command. this feels janky

also turns out if you have a build.rs file it will build stuff for you when compiling? I just ran into this being described in the docs. well guess what. I have a build.rs file. it isn't being used for that though. I mean hasn't caused any problems, or has it?! I DON'T KNOW

config options seem more explicit than this naming nonsense. I just had to rename my project everywhere so it can be a cargo command. ffs now my git links are broken and shit.

I thought rust was verbose because it knew the merits of being explicit. can they stick to their principles pls

Boss started using new approach to naming tasks. I am NOT thrilled.

Why do software companies make a huge point on their websites what kind of technologies they use, in addition to drop-naming the various development methodologies they practice? I was under the impression that clients, other than programmers (and perhaps people who manage programmers), won't have the faintest idea about what these words mean and how they relate to the product that needs to be built or the problem that needs solving?

As a second observation, most software company websites seem focused on the client - case studies, services, portfolio, work with us etc. Often however, their blogs are all about development and programming and not targeted at the client. Why? Just to get page views and improve their search ranking?

Why those f***ers in Freescale was unable to keep architecture same across their product lines? Why has KL25Z completely different archtecture than KL28Z? Registers are renamed randomly, peripheries removed and added with different architecture... That naming is just happy coincidence not same line in their products...

This porting is gonna be fun.

FML.

Ok, so currently in my Java course on Udemy we are going more in-depth into scope and visibility, and I'm currently doing the challenge for it.

So I'm doing it and the challenge is to have every single name of a variable or method be called 'x' (just to better understand scope and vis, he mentions how this is not a good practice AT ALL) with the exceptions of the classes and scanner var (but there is an optional challenge to also make them named x).

Now that I progressed into it, I noticed something. This challenge is literally making me make my code so DRY and outside-the-box-thinking that, what if, this could be a practice?

Not the naming everything in your code the same var name, but doing that at the start and then renaming the variables after coding. Because right now, I feel as though I am using SO MUCH less code than if I had the liberty of naming my classes, methods, and variables different things, it's actually kinda cool.

I'll attach my code from the challenge to this after by it really amazed me how well my code looked compared to my previous challenges and even personal projects!

I took a few days off to move and when I came back, my manager had posted a message in chat about how horrible one of the naming conventions was (an implementation I made). One of my co-workers then defended it and defended something else I wrote that he was complaining about.

We had a 1:1 the day I got back and holy shit ... I did loose my cool and I'm not proud of it, but the guy went totally bat shit. He said I was the problem with them team, screaming about going off and writing rouge things, how he was my boss and I needed to do what he fucking told me to.

In my 20+ years in tech, I have never had to deal with a psycho. He served work release for assault and witness tampering last year and he told us a story that made it seem like it was his all his "crazy ex-girlfriend" who made trumped up charges. After that conversation, I doubt that's the case.

He's still under house arrest for something else until the end of May too. The entire team told me not to do any 1:1 calls with him and our project manager, who is really amazing, will probably be on any calls we need to do in the future.

I've also all confidence in him as a manager. Even when our PM tried to do a retro for the team, he still passively aggressively bitched about things that obviously related to my projects and the entire team could see it.

Look, dude, I'm a busy man. Can you please not waste 15 minutes of my FUCKING time on your misunderstanding of code I FUCKING wrote? Code I wrote, apparently wrong, based on your SHITTY naming?

Christ alive, stop getting in my god damn way.

feature request / suggestion / wish:

i would love to "reblog" posts, or any other way they will be visible in my profile ("mark as favorite", "star"...).

the idea behind it is to have a nice little collection of posts i want to keep available to me.

i even have a suggestion for naming the action: "inherit post" ;)

hopefully i did not just miss an already implemented feature :P

Hey Everyone, first of all I’d like to start with my usual, hope all is well today as always! Today I’d like to post my first official rant.... so anyone that knows me in person or in general knows me as a good helpful young man, right now Milo is happy but has the urge to rant..

So... not naming anyone specifically from uni... one person specifically always on Facebook messaging me for my assessments, now me being me i try to say No, but the issue is i want people to do well, i put my heart into my work and people just want assignments handed to them on a gold platter, it takes me a lot longer to try and get concepts around my head , I usually always stay up late nights to get a better understanding of things. As you may see my work means a lot to me.

I always mention to my friends if they wish to do well, they must sacrifice going out clubbing or other social things for a later time. I spend my majority of the week learning new things related to programming Monday - Saturday, and on Sunday i have my free time , with the usual work out session thrown inbetween :-).

So anyways, thats it for my rant, I’d love to know if anyone has been through a similar instance? If so would love to hear about it!.

Thank you for taking the time to read my long rant once again :-)

Milo 🥂☺️

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

Fucking American tech lead rejecting PR because he wanted me to change disallow_some_feature to prohibit_some_feature 😡
FYI English was never your fist language either. It was because (from what I have read on the internet)

You did not have a first language just that you adopted it. And “called it your own”.

And you go on and and about Indian accent !!!

F*c*k accent. I’ll rant about your f*c*k*n* attitude. Guess time to change jobs.

BTW American based projects would do much better (in your f’ing opinion without this naming convention)

(This is not targeted at all Americans, I have had some good technical feed back as well. With some really good edge case catches which I over looked, this is meant for one f*c*i*n* project manager/Dev)

Double standards 😡😡

Not only does every app need to have an export option, but new exports must create new, time-stamped files rather than overwriting an existing export!

A counter-example is "Battery Monitor Widget" by CCC71 or 3C71. That app creates a file in the main user directory, named "bmw_history.txt" (no relation to the car manufacturer).

When a new export is created, the existing bmw_history.txt is overwritten. This could lead to data loss if the user is unaware of this behaviour.

The developer thought of creating an export ability, but messed up at the file naming process.

Mandatory time-stamped user data exports for every app would not be so bad. This makes sure no developer would forget about it. GDPR gave us data portability for social media platforms. Let's do it for apps too. (Sorry, Samsung Internet, you can no longer lock in saved pages. Your users are sick of it.)

There is this ERP/MES integration project in which I am involved as a developer who helps a team of industry engineers in my company to write some scripts (in Quickscript .Net god forbids) to consume a SOAP based web service developed by the ERP maintainer team from another company.
I will just keep every stupid technical aspect I ve seen unspoken and highlight the naming convention used in the web service methods.
One of the web methods named "zzwswo" which only after consulting a bunch of pdf nomenclature docs that I realized it means the following:
"zz" seems to be a prefix for custom db tables in the ERP system.
"ws" is probably Web Service.
"wo" is Work Order.

I lost hours trying to figure out methods. I think this is why not everyone should be allowed to write code.

I wonder when we'll stop the abuse of naming conventions like name & surname, by this I mean not all cultures have a surname but most of us are ignorant about it and those people when they are presented with an obligation to fulfill that field they cannot do it legally, because they'll lie.

A more open approach with only one field for full text identity would solve this issue.

I'm not experienced in VB Forms. So can someone who is, tell me if I'm just too inexperienced or if Im right about this?
Im tasked with fixing some bugs in a VB Forms project that a privious employee wrote some years ago. When I opened the project and checked it out, there was over 5600 lines of code in the codebehind for the form.
I feel like this is somewhat bad practice, no comments, no documentation... Nothing. And to top it off, among the worst naming of Subs and variables ever. Stuff like: "Run", "Stop", "Feeder", "When Load".
Oh, and the best part? The guy forgot some test code in the software, so when he left, the software stoped functioning. For real, he coded in a dependency to his own account in The AD.

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