Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

The problem with being a programmer...

I just broke up with a girl I've been seeing the past 2 months, that I was really into.

But in the end, it became a question of, either i'm with her, or I'm with my work.

I don't think that would happen with other professions, at least, not as easily.

I think, with other professions or projects, you tell someone "I need to work" and it's really fucking understood. "Ok, you need to work"

They understand it. If I was a lawyer.. I have a case. if I was a carpenter, I have a wall to build,
or a house. Etc. All understood things. Or physical things that can be seen.

But with programming, first of all, I work my own hours, I write software and then sell it. I do it all myself, I own my own business. I don't have normal hours like a job, but I do know my requirements, which is at LEAST 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted work.

If I had a "job" it would be like "gotta go to work" and that would be it.

But, because I work for myself, and because the things I build, aren't like something you physically see, nobody gets it.

My parents, as supportive as they are, will never understand how I just implemented a new design pattern and like, leveled up because of it.

They see software... buttons, and even then, when I try to explain what excites me, it's like trying to get a 3 year old interested in calculus.

How could they possibly understand the richness of what I do, how fulfilling it is
and how much I love it, when all they see
is me on a computer, clicking keys.

The same for this girl I dated.

The only place I feel where people understand,
is here.

Do you have any similar experiences to share?
Would love to hear it right now.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

TL;DR: Teacher wants to invest in my company 😲

So, just this morning as I headed to class (still in school, 17 years old, from Germany) someone tapped me from behind - a female teacher whom I've only seen a few times (She is a really nice and friendly teacher who teaches economics)
She asked me: Aren't you the young businessman? I've seen your interview, fantastic! (Background info: I recently founded my second firm (Webdevelopment, Design and Marketing) and was quite often in the media (local newspaper, television, radio))
Quite unsure, I responded: "yeah, right".
Promptly she asked: "Is there some way I can invest in your company? Perhaps in stocks?" (Of course we can't offer stocks, we're just a small local company lol)
Me: "There always is a way I guess?" (I was extremely grateful but didn't know how to respond)
Her: "Great! Would you mind sending me an email with your contact info?"

What the fuck just happened. 😂

I started in 2015 at my current job. The first contract was for a year, very normal in the Netherlands. Also, I had only 6 months of professional experience with programming.
I already knew that I would replace an older colleague who's going to retire and I would get some of his responsibilities.

One year later (6 months ago) I had an evaluation with my boss. He told me he was proud I learned everything so quick and offered me a permanent position and wanted me to take over one of the major products we sell. Even more, he wanted me to decide how to change the framework since it's over 20years old. (Multiple languages combined)

I am currently working on a new design and UX as well, which I presented last year. The love it.

I've never felt so appreciated and valued before.

Client asks for redesign to look more like XYZ site.

I deliver a redesign to look more like XYZ site.

Client wants the site to look more like his old site. But different. Gives extensive instructions on how to design his website to his liking.

At some point, I think I'll be owing him money for his design/dev services, not the other way around.

What is it with these people?

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

A contractor at my old job was doing a development role and was constantly annoyed and the idiotic design decisions going into the website backend we were developing 🙄😒

When he decided enough was enough he could have easily written a really snarky email but instead he wrote the most sincere and professional email to his boss and the director thanking them profusely for the opportunity and hopes he would be welcome for future work with the business....👍

He was a really good Dev and the email made the bosses super happy thanking him so much and how much of a shame it was he was going....😍

He bcc'd me on the mail and when he handed his computer in he told me to open the email and highlight in full....👌

At the end of every line in white text was 'Go Fuck yourself' or 'Zero fucks given'

The bosses never realised... And I know he's been back there about 4 months now..... But shhh 😭

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

This is a long rant. Sorry in advance. I just want to let it all out.

I don't really know what John (not his real name) did to my boss, who I shall name as Steve. Does he have a personal grudge? Like wtf?

John wasn't even incompetent. He even helped us mobile developers in our designs using photoshop. He's flexible. Ok sure, he isn't a top performer, but he isn't a low performer either. But why the fucking hate? really.

We currently have a new project, and are assigned to our posts. Then Steve goes, "Ok John, you will remain in the old project." He already said it once, which is fine. But did he really have to bring it up EVERY TIME? "John doesn't have to go overtime because he's in the old project, so it'll only be us." Like really? Of course we know that. why do you have to keep repeating that John isn't included? He even pointed at John during this. John shouldn't have been in the meeting then. Dipshit.

There was a meeting with the Web team in regards to what the progress was. When it came to John, Steve had to say, "The design is so ugly." Ok.. first off, you are not the QA to say that. And everyone else says it's fine. Even the QA says it's fine. So wtf? Why do you hate him so much?

We have these friday meetings in where we present our topics to the team, like Object Oriented Programming, SDLCs, and the like. We presented our stuff, and Steve listened attentively to everyone. But when it came to John, guess what? he ain't listening. He's on his phone, on his EARPHONES even. fucking rude. When John finished, he said, "You didn't present everything." He talked for an hour and a half. His topic has many things. Of course he can't present everything. And that is all you have to say? What about the others then? The others didn't present everything but you didn't complain. Why do you have to humiliate him to everyone else?

Way to demoralize your employee. What a lead. Fucking piece of shit. I am treating John pizza since I can't do anything else for him. It's frustrating. I wouldn't be surprised is John left the company.

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

Me, doing ui design: 'hm, i feel like jumping into machine learning right now'

Me, writing a ml chatbot: 'but what if i extend flutter with my old custom android components'

Me, porting java components to dart: 'hold on, p5js has vectors, i could make a physical simulation'

Me to me: 'why are you like this'

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

I was tasked with maintaining a handful of chemistry simulations for the web. First things first, replace these outdated links and turn them into Bootstrap buttons that work on mobile. Wait, why do all of these look so horrible on mobile? nothing's scaling properly. *looks at fucking 1,000-line CSS file* The old developers used position:absolute for absolutely EVERYTHING. And I counted one div on the entire page. This is why you don't trust chem engineers to do your "web design" #FuckDreamweaver

Stupid shitheads among the web designers, fucking listen up. Your fucking design is not the point of websites - the content is. You are not supposed to shove the content away to have your moron design shine in its purest debility.

Yeah I know, white space minimalism yadda yadda, clean interface - and you dumbasses just remove functionality to simulate a clean interface, to the point of using hamburger fuckups on desktop. Pull your heads out of your asses, that's not how to design an interface! Not to mention that you idiots still guzzle through the megabytes and dozens of domain lookups for your chickenshit minimalism.

While we're at it, not everyone is 20 years old like you youngsters - you won't believe it, but there is life beyond 40, and while such age is unthinkable to you because you are so dumb that you will hardly reach that age anyway, others on this planet have managed to get there. No 20/20 laser sight, you know.

Fuck you with your light grey thin fonts on white background because it looks "clean", it just SUCKS you wankers. Fuck you with your stupid ghost buttons that don't even look like a button. You know how to operate the shit you made, but reality check here, users spend most of their time on fucking other websites than on the abomination you have designed!

Get that into the shit bubble that you call your brain and read WCAG 2.1! That's not only for disabled people, but everyone will be able to use that shit better!

I've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.

But they still need:

1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.

2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.

3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.

4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.

I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.

My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!

I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!

WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.

Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!

We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤

I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!

I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.

YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!

I was looking up this vsauce video about comic sans when an ad crossed my way.
What an eyecatcher! I want a website in that style now...

Who the fuck doesn't use responsive design. Oh yeah my Job. Thank God I quit Friday. Fuck this old ass dirt company

I've been at my job for about 3 months now. They have me remaking a 10 year old site so that it's responsive and updated to HTML5. well the "senior developer" I'm working under doesn't know squat about responsive design and doesn't know that tags like font are deprecated so he's basically just copy pasting old code into bootstrap grid and calling that "updating the site". Lol did I mention he's still declaring the doctype as HTML 4 too? how did I get stuck here? -_-

My little brother started learning coding AND design ar 12 years old and my only influence on this was telling him about it like two times.
Although he is, also, building a gun of wood so I really don't know what path he's taking there.

So… I released v2.0.0 of devRant UWP a few weeks ago.
Then I got a lot of reports of problems on Windows 10 Mobile and older (than 1809) versions of Windows 10 on Desktop.
I decided to resubmit v2.0.0-beta16 to the store, and try to find the issue in the update… I didn't find it.
The code seems the same as the working version (at least the part I try to test is 100% equal).

So it seems I fucked up the vs project.

This means that to find the issue I can spend weeks to search it over and over inside the latest project (using shitty emulators of older Windows 10 builds to debug it), or I could just restore it to the old v2.0.0-beta16 (released in august) and implement again every single new feature and fix (something like 5 new features, dozens of improvements, changes and bug fixes).

In any case, this will require a lot of time (which I don't have at this moment).
I'm really sorry for this inconvenience, I know some of you use my client daily (~3.000 users I guess), I'm really glad someone likes it, and thanks a lot for the awesome reviews and feedback, but stable v2 (v2.1.0 at this point) will be available not earlier than in February.

Probably some of you have already download v2.0.0 while it was available in the store, and maybe it works on your device (please let me know in the comments below if you did, how is it going, and also if you like the new features and improvements).

After this epic fail, and more than 1 year (way too much) of v2 public beta, I want to throw the current project in the trash, and start it from scratch.
Which means I will start to work on v3 as soon as you will see v2.1.0 in the store, making it faster, lighter and with better support for the latest Windows 10 (Fluent Design and not) features, dropping the support for the very old UWP API.

Thanks for your attention.

Have a good day (or night)!

One year for Christmas, my dad got me an old tower and installed Windows 98 on it. He also got two old-school PCI WiFi cards so that my "new" computer could access the Internet via his.

I started learning basic web development. I would convince my mom (an English teacher) to buy me books on programming all the time when she was getting her own books at the store.

Eventually, I got a book on Blitz Basic and started making my own video games.

Then GameMaker, Java, C/C++, and more web development and design happened until all the sudden, out of nowhere, I'm a computer scientist 😁

It's crazy how much we owe to our parents. And neither us nor them even realized what they were doing at the time!

Long rant...

*Designer Posted image of newly designed layout for our app on trello.

Dev 1 (me, being the junior, on ios) : so... What's the size for x, Y, z, a, B, C?

She: it's 9 for the small text, 10 for sub title, 12 for main title.

*shows her the design on app
Dev 1: seems too small

She: just make it to look not small.

Dafug?

*finishes the app layout for that screen.
*working on next screen

Dev 1: your new design is for the screen of 1920x1080. But our supported screen size starts from 320 width. So there'll be text overlapping each other and ui might screw up.

She: uh.. Just... Put those that will overlap to the next line.

*shrugs
Dev 1: ok
=======
2 days later
Dev 2 (senior, working on Android)
Dev 2: so... What's the colour for x, Y, z

*Dev 1 laughs on the inside because of the struggles we have with her.

Dev 1 to Dev 2: is it common for her not to follow the design guidelines?

Dev 2: yeah man.. We just have to adapt her design into our app guidelines.

*sigh

Dev 2: there's a new icon here on this screen, so you wanna change the icon? Can I have the icon file?

She: oh.. No.. Use back the old one, because I just copy and paste.

Dev 1: so... This progress bar of yours, doesn't show its background colour, because you filled it already. So what's the background colour if the bar isn't filled?

She : hmm.... Oh.. Well.. Maybe try x.. ? *doesn't look nice* how about Y? *doesn't look nice* how about...

Me : why not you try in your computer first instead of me changing it here by code, it's much faster this way.

*seriously, wth?

Dev 1 and 2: there's additional text in your new design, what is it for?

She : oh.. No no. I copied extra due to copy and paste. Just ignore it.

Dev 1 and 2: what's the spacing gap between x and Y? And how about the size of the box?

She : oh.. I just estimate it, and for the box, not sure either, you can follow old design, because I'm just putting a box there for illustration purpose.

Mother fickle, what fuck man.

Dev 1 and 2: *flips table.
*we didn't, but.. It's freaking annoying.

Yesterday, I finished the front-end of a project for a client. Responsive, clean,.. Looking 'smexy' :D

Today I've got an email of the client, saying he made some small design adjustments...

I think you already know where this is going.. But inline-css everywhere, fixed widths, br's as spacers,.. (It was like an old Frontpage-like design..)

I've changed the FTP user.. From now on, he has to request his changes so that I can apply them.. Damnit.. But hey, extra paid hours of work I guess :D

Just found out that softmaker.de has a website were they publish one of their professional fonts every month.
I looked at it and then downloaded all previous months. 😂
I just ❤ the web archive!

---

Btw. does anyone has experience with the officesuite from softmaker.com on linux?
They provide an office-suite for linux as well which I appreciate but I'm not that hyped since I currently don't need it and the design is kinda old fashioned. (I once tested FreeOffice.)

So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.

I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.

I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.

Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...

I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!

A few things to note:

Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.

This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.

Most Microservices currently built in golang.

All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.

RabbitMQ used as a message broker.

And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.

The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.

So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.

Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.

Peace ✌🏼

WHY THE FUCKING FUCK CAN FUCKING DESIGNERS NOT FUCKING DESIGN TO FUCKING STANDARDS.

Do they have to just piss all over photoshop and expect us developers to turn their insanity into something that doe snot make us fucking cringe.

To top it off its some old ass legecy product bloated up with that useless peice of shit bootstrap, guess they forgot to mention that to the designer too, not that it would of made any difference with this pile of shit he churned out.

I fucking hate all these JavaScript frameworks. You try to learn one and then there is another one that's rising up. While you wonder why a framework exists and what's the best use case there is a fresh off college grad who built a fucking app on it. How the fuck is it even possible? Did you study the framework? Did you understand how it works? Or did you just put together a bunch of tutorials and built the app. I feel people just want to churn apps out without bothering about understanding the framework. Ask them about design patterns... They know nothing about it. Ask them vanilla JavaScript questions.... They fumble easily. Ask them OOPs..... They look dumbfounded. WTF!!!

Or maybe I am just getting old. It's possible.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:

Me:

Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files

Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software

Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP

IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files

Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp

Network: No internet access, internal company network only

Web browser: IE 6

Graphical design software: msPaint

Version control: Emails

Team communication: Emails

Software distribution vector: Emails

Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers

Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

20+ years ago we got a contract to replace an old home grown system for managing rented equipment for a company with offices in two countries with a new standard system.

I was tasked with building a few addon modules to handle import and reporting that the standard system lacked.

Over the course of 8 months and multiple trips to their head office for on premises development along side their people that knew how it should work (there was a lot of waiting for info so it was not 8 months of actual work) we finally was ready to present the finished solution.

After about one hour of demonstration their boss questioned why we did not demonstrate the connection to their corporate group accounting system ...

“Corporate group accounting?”

After some confused discussion it turns out that in one of the first meetings the sales person had they had mentioned this accounting system and that all accounting info was to be exported there.

This requirement was never listed in the specifications we got and looking into it it turned out that the standard system did not support such exports at all.

In the end we had to throw it all away as it proved impossible to get that info out of the system (which was not of our design).

We barely avoided having to repay all fees as their people had approved the specification but standing there without a clue to what he was asking for was a very scary experience, thinking “how could we miss this?”

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

I finally gave in into the peer pressure and made myself a Twitter account.

WHAT A FUCKING SHIT SITE.

When registering the only thing I provided was my email and username. Nothing more.

One day later when visiting Twitter I get a big ass pop-up that briefly tells me my account is locked for 'unusual behavior', 'suspicious activity' and 'not following of Twitter's rules'.

I want to remind you that my account was barely one day old, and had no activity whatsoever.

So if getting your account locked for no single reason isn't bad enough. The only and ONLY way to unlock my account was TO PROVIDE MY FUCKING PHONE NUMBER. No other single way to unlock my account.

YOU WANT MY PERSONAL DATA SO BADLY?

On top of that I didn't receive a single email from them for this 'suspicious activity' or 'breaking of Twitter's rules'.

THIS IS SCAREWARE. Lying to people in order to get more personal data. My account was perfectly fine. And without providing your phone number you can't even delete your account.

GO FUCK YOURSELF FUCKING ASSHOLES WITH YOUR ASSHOLE DESIGN

FUCKING SHITSITE

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Continued from previous post.

As the chill wind blows outside, the man picks up his laptop and phone. Slowly walks towards his bed and lifts an old hoodie. With easy he slides it on him, pulls the hood over his head. He turns around facing the window. On the back of his old hoodie, there is a design which looks faded and discolored. Below it some words which too are faded. He walks towards the window and glances on the street. It's still empty. All he can hear is the wind.
"Perfect", he says to himself and walks out his room.
As he is about to exit the building, he sees an Apache chopper passing above. It zooms above the street. A wild guess he makes, probably it's heading where he is heading.
His phone vibrates with a message.
"It's ready".

Stop teaching people deprecated bulls*it.

I'm taking a "Web Design" course and the teacher wants us to use html attributes and the <font> tag to format pages. He doesn't allow us to use CSS. Says "We'll get to CSS later, right now I'm teaching you HTML". He thought us the <frameset> thing which isn't even supported in HTML5. And of course no <header>, <footer>, <aside> etc.

Same thing in my C++ course. The computers don't even have a C++11 (or newer) compiler. Just an old version of Code::Blocks we're not allowed to update. It does support C++0x so you can still get some of the features, but still.

Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?

I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!

If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!

And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.

So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.

My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..

Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..

My opinion.

10 year anniversary 'celebration' for a couple of employees (one dev, one a DBA) and the VP of the department was saying kind words about them, talking about the 'good old days'.

VP to the DBA: "I apologize, when you started, you walked into my database architecture. I didn't know that much back then and never thought about the architecture much beyond a few years. Its amazing my design has lasted over 20 years and triple digit business growth..blah blah blah"

Inner voice: "Mother F-er!...My database was designed IN SPITE of your meddling and demanding to create 1,500 field tables. Shut the F up you egotistical bastard!"

I can't even count how many times I had to stop him from, for example, adding a 'ProductID' field to a Customer table.

Me: "Why did you add a product id field?"
VP: "How else will we know what product the customer wants to buy?"
Me: "You mean like a wish list? What if the customer wants more than one product?"
VP: "Oh, that’s easy, we'll create more fields when that happens. ProductID2. Microsoft made it really easy to add fields."
Me: "We already have a wish list table schema. Customer can have as many wish lists and as many products as they want."
VP: "I don't understand. All I want is a field for me to store the product I'm buying. I don't know why you make this so hard, its just one more field."

Now the VP is bragging all the success was due to his expertise?! Gaaaaahhhh!

I quelled my rage with ample quantities of donuts, juice, and chocolate milk.

I really like my current job.

I work as an analyst developer looking after and sorting out people's old tech debt.

Once that's stable I get pretty free reign to do what I want.

It allows me to stretch from dev into graphic design, security, architecture and training on a very regular basis.

It allows me to keep an eye on tech trends, research and develop ideas using the latest shiny things.

Oh and if I say I need a thing, I can usually get it purchased.

All of the above comes with the "as long as it's for the benefit of the company" disclaimer, but when your direct managers see an IDE and think "okay he's working" the lines get a little blurry.

They keep asking me about my career goals and if I want to manage or move around. Fuck that noise, all of that noise.

Do wut I wawnt.

The fact that I have to convert a 90s-ish design into a WordPress theme despite the boss trying to convince our client that WP's shit and we should do it in something else doesn't tilt me as much as it should.

But what DOES tilt me and piss me off is the fact that the shitheads told us to 'make the design better', and so I tried; I made one of their graphics responsive by only designing it with CSS (and for once, I even made it work right) because they wanted a mobile-friendly version but failed to supply a mobile-version PSD so I had to improvise and they had the balls to tell my boss that they're 'disappointed that we failed to follow the guidelines'.

Did you bitchsicles even bother to hire a proper fucking designer who would know how to fucking design a PSD to convert into HTML? There's no fucking grid, the design's all over the fucking place like your mother after a Viagra-fueled Friday night bukakke party at an old home and the colors are an eyesore like your own fucking selves if you ever bothered looking in the fucking mirror. Fuck you all to hell.

Maybe in special dedication to @kiki.

I cut the unit tests down in LOC size by roughly 50 - 60 % in most projects.

It's really easy once one sees unit tests not as a dunking pile of copy pasta wild west, but rather as a code base that needs architecture and design.

Some extensions, some annotations, some good old helper classes.

Pooooof.

Why I did this? ...

Because it's fucking annoying when you read a PR with tests and need a fucking diff tool to spot the difference between two tests cause they're 80 % the same.

Yeah. Thx for giving me brain cramps, motherducker.

I'm not an expert in unit tests, but if all test codebases look like the "usual stuff" in our projects...

It's no wonder bugs exist...

The design process.

Call me old fashioned - but clean-code/clean-architecture/SOLID is not as important as simplicity and coherence.

I JUST NEED FUNCTION THAT DOES STUFF! But noooooo better overly design EVERYTHING!

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

Im 17 and Im studying IT in Norway. I started learning to program when I was 9 years old (web design) and then later moved onto Object oriented programming. Now in some classes we do web design, I can watch Netflix in programming classes

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

I just fucking hate BGAs* that unsolder themselves.

So, thanks to my laptop slowly breaking apart I decided to reactivate an old netbook my father gave me back in 2014(?) when it failed, to have a device on standby if necessary.

Wasn't really planning to repair it and kept it for spare parts mostly as the whole device is a fucking design failure concerning heat dissipation.

But yet again, I thought I'd give it a try one-two years ago. I soon found out it was said heat problem that caused the error in the device and it'd probably only take some reworking using a heat gun, which I did. Netbook worked for some hours, then was dead again, same error. Lost motivation and stashed it until this week.

Reworked with a hair-dryer this time and it worked! Well, until this morning - same error. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to run a VM and then shut down the device right after that.

I will now try only one more time, this time just baking the whole damn main board thoroughly.
Either it works or it's really dead after. Either way, I'll be somewhat happier then.

* Ball Grid Array - package type for electronic components like ICs/uControllers

Working as a part time student on an app and until now I thought I was the king of software development.
Well, fuck me and my high horse.

Today the stuff we send from the client to the server didn't arrive, so I asked the backend guy if he could take a look at the packages arriving. He did and told me the data was messed up.
I did only design stuff the last week or so, so I was very confused. After reverting back to one old commit after the other it struck me.
I still don't know how such a dumb mistake could have happened to me, the king of Android apps, but apparently I replaced all occurrences of a specific keyword in just the strings and comments of the whole project. Key became KeyList, so instead of <Keys> my XML contained <KeyList> which made no goddamn sense whatsoever.
Did I mention that we have an important deadline tomorrow? Yeah...

So now I leaned my lesson. Never trust XML.

JK I'm dumb. That's the lesson here.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

!rant
Medium long story about POP!_OS

TL;DR : A true K.I.S.S. OS. Very well designed UI. In general suitable for everyone. Any distro-hoppers MUST try out. If your current OS is already heavily customized to your needs, DON'T bother with POP. (Read till the end if you are on toilet, nothing to lose)

Backstory : I am never a fanboy of anything although I am loyal to the tools I use daily. So OS is also something I picked and use to meet my needs except when I was a student. My first linux experience was about a decade ago with ubuntu. Have tried almost all kinds of light-weight and minimal distros after that (lubuntu, arch, mint, puppylinux, fedora, centos and others I forgot) during my student years.

I like all things minimal. ("Keep It Simple Stupid" is my email signature.) When I started working, Windows became the sole OS I use since it met my needs better than others. Except that one time when I tried Elementary. Although I found it a good OS, it didn't get installed as a dual-boot. I don't find Elementary minimal. It is one of well designed OSs but I still think it can be improved. (Plus I had this weird feeling that it is similar to Mac OS)

At the start of this year, Widows alone was not enough for my needs. Decided to look for a minimal linux distro. My old i7 ASUS has 8GB RAM and roughly 250GB free storage. So I am not that worried about hardware requirements. My main struggle is downloading stuffs. (Few of you guys must know by now the speed of my internet LOL.) Well, even if I had a good speed, I will still look for minimal distro as first priority. So I went with minimal ubuntu image and xubuntu environment. Although I do not like the UI design, it is acceptable. Through out the years, I have configured it to suit my needs and currently pretty happy with it.

Thoughts on POP!_OS : To me, it is literally like meeting a young girl who is perfect for my life. She has the perfect body, beautiful face, amazing appearance and good manners. And she is young, of course there is a lack of experience issue. But it can be taught and she has a very high chance to become a wonderful lady if she continues like this. Only crap is I already have someone and in a committed relationship. So I could not go any further than introduction. I do save her contact and will keep in touch with her online. You know? Things change. Things always change somehow.

Customer: I want to be included in any and all design and development meeting in the future.

Me: OK, I mean, I'm just one person so there's not formal meetings as such...

Customer: Nevertheless, I wish to be included and ensure my needs are met.

Some time passes.

Me: So, I'm thinking of swapping out the old Beanshell interface, cos, really... Interpreted, scriptable Java isn't great and most users don't want to write Java just to run some jobs. Could you help me with creating an API that fits you and your departments needs?

Customer: No, I'm way to busy to deal with this right now!

Me: And when would be convenient for you?

Customer: I don't know, just not now.

To this day, despite successfully integrating the rhino js engine into the app, part of the software I develop has a bean shell interface rather than js, Python or lua.

-_- I hate bean shell...

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.

This is a true story. We had this subject, called “Web Design” (really, “design”), where we studied HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL (confusing, right?). And when we get the PHP (e-)book, it was this old PDF (probably downloaded illegally) teaching the legacy 4.0 version of PHP. Anyway, when we had to develop the final project, the sane professor allowed us to use a newer version of PHP — 5.2, released on 2008. I had to follow the rules, so I developed probably the less secure web application I will ever develop. That means no protection from SQL injection, XSS vulnerable and a bunch of other security holes… And that’s how they liked it developed!

PM in sprint review, after some colleagues complained about having to develop requirements on their own:
you are software engineers, your main task is to design software systems. this is the tricky part. coding is easy... it's a stupid task, i could do it, my nine year old daughter could do it.

shall i feel a bit offended? also i think, he is wrong... i also design while i'm coding, i'm designing all the time.
also, i love coding :( this is the most satisfying aspect of my job.
but then again, i heard there are people who code without designing... even though i cannot imagine how to work like that at all.

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

We spent 9 hours taking a vote, across all of the dev team (including junior devs), about how to design the backend architecture and which security measures we should take.

The CTO refused to listen to the person assigned to the design (me at the time) because he preferred fire-and-forget for EVERYTHING, ignoring all of the blatant drawbacks, and claimed that "there is no truly fault tolerant system", which is such a cop-out that my mind still cannot fathom it.

So therefore, since he couldn't have it his way, we took it to a vote (not my decision). Spent nine hours discussing the pros and cons of HTTP vs MQ systems to arrive at a vote.

I "won", and then left the company shortly after, because it was clear that even though the votes were in my favor, I was going to be "nickel and dimed" to death about the changes and how it's deployed, etc. to the point the system will end up like the previous systems they wrote.

Oh and the fact I was asked to help "improve morale" for the team that was working on the old, broken, overengineered project (I don't manage them nor did I write any of that code) by being assigned to arrange breakfast catering because it'd somehow mean more "coming from a senior dev".

I loved the people there - truly, some of the best people - but the company was broken from the ground to the ceiling.

CTO was let go a while after I left, I guess - most of the dev team has since left too and the majority of their work is being outsourced to Indian subcontractors.

Got to scratch of one of three remaining old (14years and counting) design mistakes this week.

Together with a colleague we replaced a 1.5 billion row table that I out of ignorance then designed with a 3 column composite primary key instead of an identity column.

Moving the data while keeping all synchronized (the table gets up towards 2 million new rows and 2 million updates a day while constantly being queried) took 1 week.

Just 2 skeletons left to clean out, any year now ;).

This is a classic example of "We need to justify our Dev's salaries so we made a bunch of changes in the name of innovation."

Why did they have to do this? I miss the old design where one swipe from the top had 5 icons, one for wifi, one for mobile data, one for Bluetooth, one for battery saver and one for flashlight. If you wanted to access something extra, one more pull and you'd get all of the notification tray options.

Now these fucking things take up half of the screen. Absolutely worthless design.

Bloody scammers and bloody Paypal.
So I bought echo spot just to see how good it's voice recognition is and also wanted to see what the spot does different. So I found out that it was like hello world for AI. So I wanted to sell it on ebay-kleinanzeigen.de. It's a website from Ebay here in Germany where you can easily sell your stuff that you don't need anymore. I put it there and someone just wanted it so badly and he said that he broke his friends spot and he has no money and he need it very badly cheaper. My price was 98€ and I believed him and sold it for 85€. Now he got the device and wants the refund because the device doesn't match the description and the things he mentioned weren't even in the description. The message you see in the pic it says: It doesn't do skype and it is impossible on that device. First It is his responsibility to inform himself about the device features I'm not Amazon to write something like that in the description I've to just say how the device looks. Second it does skype and it is possible but both partners must have the same device and they should connect it to their smartphones.
But that is not the bad part that my money is ceased and got ownd by a scammer. The bad part is that I wanted to reply his message but the bloody paypal design won't let me do that. Remind me how old is paypal now? It's been there for ages and the footer is just stuck in the middle of the page and won't allow me to click on reply button. Of course I later managed to write a reply but paypal shouldn't have these kind of problems.
I'm so upset right now because these things are wasting my time. I've my final exame in a week and I've to develop a parameter based multilingual CMS, just imagine how long would just data structure take.

I'm looking at old code that I wrote around half a year ago, and noticed that my coding style changed over time (relying more on arguments to pass messages between commands and functions, rather than sourcing the result of a command). I feel like this old code isn't truly mine anymore. It's thousands upon thousands of lines of code though... Given that, would you rewrite it or just move along with the existing design? I mean in my opinion the current code really sucks.

Damn frontend crap.

The fact that you have to mask all of the disease with processable versions of css, html & js is bad enough, but there are like 6 dialects of each bandaid, and every project has traces of each.

The the design kid tells me to run this grunt script, frontender number two screams "no, dont use grunt, we use gulp! or was it bower? I guess just run it through yeoman, it's easy!", after which the third fucking shitty hipster yells "No that's outdated, just edit the webpack file, and then run yarn install... oh but run npm upgrade --global yarn first"

Did you just fucking tell me to upgrade a fucking package manager with another package manager?

Composer, gem or cargo are not always without problems. But at least us backenders have our fucking shit together. The worst we have to deal with is choosing Python 2 vs 3, or porting some old code so the server can migrate to PHP7.

The next person to tell me they found this awesome tool to manage his other tools... I'll fucking throw your latte all over your wacom tablet.

It's a toss up between a basic software portal for my old school as a volunteer thing or an old game designed around user content creation.

The portal is more of a personal success but the game was a success in the respect it ended up rolling past a Bethesda employee and he gave me a one on one Skype chat about there design methods.

!Rant; Week40
Honestly, before starting my post secondary education in Computer science I had wanted to become an architect.
Since I was maybe.... 10 years old all the way till the semester before graduating from highschool I was sold on becoming an architect.
I love design; Interior design, art, unique use of colors, architecture. I love systems that looked good and worked as well as they appeared.
Over the winter break of my grade 12 year a friend said to me, "Why don't you become a UI/UX developer? You love technology, software and design, why not go into a career where you practice on all three?".
I was surprised to hear that. It had honestly never really occurred to me since I had always told myself I would become an architect.
I guess that leaves me to where I am now. Still a student, but loving my time learning the details behind software development. I do not regret choosing Development over becoming an Architect.

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

Agency hires me to convert a 4 column + sidebar + pattern backgrounds email to responsive, for a big client, I make a redesign, simplifying it (less columns, flat...) to avoid issues, client insists, exactly the same design is needed.

I tell him its almost impossible but I will try, and try, and try, many times, but on their old Outlook, some email parts are not aligned (just that), try, and try, many hours, many days beyond budget... all the times since first explaining that perfection is not possible with all possible email clients, and like 7% is using outlook... At that point, and before, email was so well.

Finally I put an end to this, tell them to pay and leave me alone, as they didn't take my advises and warnings serious, not my fault.

This story is nothing until the discovery I made today: the agency had signed a contract with the client, a bank, in that contract there was the obligation to replicate exactly the same design and should be perfect in all email clients...

I agree with many people on here that Front-End web development/design isn't what it used to be.

Things used to be simple: a static page. Then we decoupled design from description and we introduced CSS; nice, clean separation, more manageable - everything looks nice up to this point.

Introduce dynamic pages, introduce JavaScript. We can now change the DOM and we can make interactive, neat little webpages; cool, the web is still fun.

Years later, we start throwing backend concepts into the web and bloating it with logic because we want so much for the web to be portable and emulate the backend. This is where it starts to get ugly: come ASP, come single pages, partial pages, templates,.. The front-end now talks to a backend, okay. We start decoupling things and we let the logic be handled by the backend - fair enough.

Even later, we start decoupling the edge processes (website setup, file management, etc.) and then we introduce ugly JavaScript tools to do it. Then we introduce convoluted frameworks (Angular,..). Sometimes we find ourselves debugging the tools themselves (grunt, gulp, mapping tools,..) rather than focusing on the development itself (as per ITIL guidelines; focus on value), no matter how promising today's frameworks claim to be ("You get to focus on your business code"; yeah right, in practice it has turned out differently for me. More like "I get to focus on wasting copious amounts of time trying to figure out your tangled web").

Everything has now turned into an unfriendly, tangled web (no pun intended).

I miss the old days when creating things for the Web used to be fun, exciting and simple and it would invigorate passion, not hate.

<my cents="2"></my>

So a week ago my boss asked me to design + build/write code for our new site from scratch.
Meanwhile the old website they have had for 5 years is still without SSL and looks pre-2000.
It's supposed to be finished and be mobile responsive by tomorrow.
                                                                                                                                                                            
                                                                   
  
       
I'm the digital marketer.

I remember at a company that I was working as a Drupal developer, I had finished building a website (both designed and developed it) using Drupal 7. I was very satisfied with the result and the way the company was operating, I had to show it to the project manager and he would say if it was OK to show it to the boss and then I would contact the client to say that we are finished.

When I showed it to the PM, he provided some changes from his personal "I know everything" book and after I made them, we both went to the boss' office. Keep in mind that I had built the website following the clients notes and preferences (custom sliders, certain color swatches etc.) and I was on point.

So, after we entered the office, we sat and I was pumped to hear good news. But, not a minute passed since the page loaded and the boss was clearly unhappy with the result, and more specifically with the changes that the PM provided (not even my fault). When he finished talking, I tried to explain that I followed exactly what the client said and executed accordingly, without the changes that the PM had put on the table. Suddenly, the boss' face was angered and turning red(ish). He started shouting at me and saying that I was not experienced enough to know what I am saying (I was 21 years old at the time), and that they had the experience to criticize if the website was ready or not and if the client would like it, pointing out that I wasn't capable of knowing what the client needed.

I was bursting in my chest, I felt a fire burning with anger and righteousness, but I turned my face down and apologized. It SUCKED! It felt SO bad. I took the notes that he said (which changed 90% of the website's design) and after that I called the client.

I felt some kind of vengeance when the client started shouting at the PM, when he saw the website. He yelled and said that, the design that the boss chose, was not remotely close to what the client had requested.

Next day after I finished the website with the design I had provided, the boss was looking at me like a (proud) wet cat, saying 'well done' but not another word, while entering his office.

Well, at least the client was happy at the end! That's all that matters, right?

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

Same as we look at some old pages and see "oh this is unstyled table layout, that is xHTML inline style - it's from the 20th century"

People will look at pages of today in like 20 years and be like "Oh gosh, the material design phase. - oh the apple-blur-copy-cat-phase, oldish HTML5 code, that's from the 2010-20-ies"

I've spent a lot of time messing around with C, having struggled with object-oriented programming (due to not really knowing how best to structure things, not knowing when to apply certain design patterns).

When writing C code, I'd write OOP-esque code (pass around a struct to routines to do things with it) and enjoyed just making things happen without having to think too much about the overall design. But then I'd crave being able to use namespaces, and think about how the code would be tidier if I used exceptions instead of having every routine return an error code...

Working with Python and Node over the past couple of years has allowed me to easily get into OOP (no separate declaration/definition, loose typing etc.) and from that I've made some fairly good design decisions. I'd implemented a few design patterns without even realising which patterns they were - later reading up on them and thinking "hey, that's what I used earlier!"

I've also had a bit of an obsession with small executable files - using templates and other features of C++ add some bloat (on Windows at least) compared to C. There were other gripes I had with C++, mostly to do with making things modular (dynamic linking etc.) but really it's irrelevant/unreasonable.

And yes, for someone who doesn't like code bloat, working with Node is somewhat ironic... (hello, node_modules...)

So today I decided to revisit C++ and dust off my old copy of C++ in a Nutshell, and try to see if I could write some code to do things that I struggled with before. One nice thing is that this book was printed in 2003, yet all of its content is still relevant. Of course, there are newer C++ standards, but I can happily just hack away and avoid using anything that has been deprecated.

One thing I've always avoided is dynamic_cast because every time I read about it, I read that "it's slow". So I just tried to work around it when really if it's the right tool for the job, I might as well use it... It's really useful!

Anyway, now I've typed all this positivity about C++ I will probably find a little later on that I hit a wall with what I'm doing and give up again... :p

I come from a fuck-all university called Visveswaraya Technological University (VTU for short) and the syllabus is something from the 90s. Now modern technology 8s taught, old AF practices and useless subjects. Hell, we're not even taught design patterns.

So what would I like to change? The whole frikkin thing. My transition from college to corporate was *BAD* because the expectations were completely different.

ME - me, TM - teammate
I was just recruited to the company. We're starting new project based on few modules.

ME: So this module will do X and Y, I will use good old interfaces and design based on abstractions so that stuff does not get glued too much.

TM: But why? Make good old processor with all the logic and throw objects at it.

ME: B-but unit tests, decomposition and othet stuff...

TM: *insists and forces me to agree*

ME: *gets shit done his way, TM checks on code review and complains but generally doesnt give a fuck*

ME: Ok, its done. Lets get shit shipped.

TM: Well, we were just told by PM that we will need to process one more source with much different logic that does not fit current solution (he did meant GOD-PROCESSOR, idea of his).

ME: What do you mean? *injects another contextual implementation of processing logic to template method pattern solution*.

TM: I will tell PM you cant make it because of the implementation.

ME: But I just did it...

TM: Impossible, processor needs to be reimplemented. Get your shit together!

ME: *still doesnt get the shit about the god processor love*

TM: *rage quits next month*

ME: *module gets reused once more 2 month later, profit*

Hitting a really deep, deep low in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the development cycle:

There comes the crunch time. No meeting goes by hearing the odious: "We don't have time for that." - One critical component needs to be finished for Big Sur and instead of addressing the real issues we keep changing design and goal. One main dev already gave up fighting the PO and team lead(!) - and now I'm next. So that dev build this really clean and minimal library as the core part. But now it's just like, yeah, take that nice Porsche engine put it on the old rusty bicycle from the shed,.. but maybe because that's so shitty we need that specially formed exhaust pipe to tune it. Yeah, very 'agile' - Only thinking about it makes me shudder in disbelief and anger. I shouldn't take that shit so serious, be emotional about shit code, I know, but I can't. Let them drive some rounds around the block, if it runs at all,.. because until now we still didn't make it run on the fuckin' street. It's all so insane. Will make some nice fireball, when it goes up in flames.

Well, I have been part of quite some shitty projects. Real suicide commandos set out to fail, and somehow stood them through or made it even "work" though it should never have. But what enrages me here is, that it needn't to be that way. We had plenty of time. Our team was often rowing along in good rhythm. And now I just feel drowned in resignation and sarcasm.

This is a bitch move, yes, but a clever one. This is a screenshot of some official chrome extension made by Apple. Notice how Apple represents a “typical non-Apple computer” as some dated, old, arguably ugly design. It surely looks a generation or two older than Apple devices around.

"Web design has a bad reputation for being stylistically trendy and same-looking. Some guy does a parallax scrolling site, and now your boss wants you to add that to your corporate PR website for some reason. Glossy buttons, Gaussian Noise, linen texture, new things that look fake-old, then back to minimalism and flat colors as a reaction to the glossy noisy textured fake-old stuff." - Jonas Downey

a very old bicycle shop... my sister is working on a new design for them, but they haven't taken the old page down and she doesn't have access/responsibility for this.

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.

Let's face it: I am and will always be a tinkerer. Yes, I know my ways around, I can sneak into legacy code bases easily and throw new stuff in there, I've seen software stacks. But scarcely sound design, really modular. Even from the cleverer, experienced ones. They can master more complexity, so they can handle more spaghetti. Some essay from the 80's had this grand idea to organically 'grow' software. That's how it looks like most of the times: cancerous, parasitic super fungi (armillaria). Yeah, we all know have to fight bit-rot and entropy, but it was all lost before already. We'll never get rid of legacy protocols, legacy code.
And even when we go green field, start a fresh. Yeah, take a great design, make everything new, after some months of throwing features and outer constraints at the thing, it's the same old mud again.
But we can still dream on: some day I will design great APIs, I will have great test coverage, documentation, UML design, autometed tests, fuzzing, memchecking, I'll work professionally, clean coder style.
Pfft forget it. Maybe change for consulting, because we'll continue to dream of the 'clean' code, so you can sell the next 'recipe', development method. It's like diets. As effective. For the one selling.

!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.

This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.

So it was time for a change. And I made a change.

It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.

I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.

Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.

So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.

So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.

Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.

This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.

Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.

"We can’t just design an item that looks great. We also have to anticipate how it is boxed up, distributed, and shipped, as well as whether or not a seventeen-year-old kid with a summer job can stock it on the store shelf without ruining it." - Robin Perkins

Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

Hi guys! I need your help.

I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.

The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.

If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.

What do you guys think?

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

I love old school design. 1990's and 2000's website has their charm.

Negative side of this: I want to be frontend dev and I can only design these, so I can't make modern website without proper designer

Does anyone know of a library I can design UI in HTML/CSS/JS for a C# app?

I need to remake my bot framework, but winforms is just so old.

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

I was a Windows user from the start had an old windows pc og and ever since that computer and my first HTML book I've wanted to code and design as a passion hobby and now work

C++99, C++03, C++11 and C++14

I love when your design finally ends up working, looks good and it's running as fast as Usain Bolt, but why the hell does OOP has to be so ugly and clunky in C++? Constructors and copy constructors designs are barf inducing. Yes I am trying to make it as readable and neat as possible but it still looks like shit overall. And related compiler errors are almost always retarded or unhelpful even though I'm used to it now.

I know you will tell me "why are you using those old ass versions?". Well unfortunately in embedded you are stuck with old crap until some envoy of the gods finally up the standards... or if I do it myself for a specific platform.

Had a deal with a client that i’ll make a website for him in a month because I have other jobs that i need to finish first. I called him 2 days ago i said that i’ll upload the website for confirmation of the design in a few days, he says ok. I get around to it, developed the frontend on localhost, put it on my server for him to approve and sent him the link. He said something about a specific photo not being grayscale or whatever - I don’t even have any info for the site that he sent, got confused, ok.. I go to his old website to get some information onto the new one, surprise surprise a new website that I don’t have anything to do with appeared. Wtf, check the ftp - was uploaded 5 days ago. Fml just wasted a day and got no sleep. 99.9% that i wont get paid. Bamboozled. Cant sleep, wtf

In my experience, any BE dev or old architect/lead programmer that says they “can do frontend” does shit like writing Ajax calls in script tags directly in the html. They are the ones who add style attributes directly in html. They are the ones who google how to center a div and they still use float positioning because all of them are old, arrogant BE devs who get caught in a single framework who convince themselves they are an expert. They can’t give any good UX advice. They don’t know how to use a screen reader. They don’t know what WCAG means. They don’t constantly keep up to date on what browsers are supporting and what’s being released in the unstable versions. They don’t know what a web component is. They don’t know what a closure is. They don’t know anything about optimizing web perf metrics. They couldn’t tell you what web crawlers look for. They couldn’t tell you anything about design principles and anti-patterns. They don’t know how to manage a web application that will be seen by millions AND keep it nice, shiny, and refactorable on the code side. What do they really fucking know? how to write an MVC app? How to connect APIs and integrate code that other people wrote? I do full stack all day and writing anything not-client-facing is super easy.

Take that stick out of your ass and get over yourself you asshole. You haven’t written anything close to amazing even though you constantly act like you’re a god-tier programmer and your shit doesn’t stink.

Hit the books like the rest of us you fuck.

The Frontend is anything but fucking easy.

!rant
Digging though my old emails found this joke sent to me long time ago. Think that originally was posted in a 1997 issue of Computerworld. Maybe you already suffered the effect of the "Opcodes" listed here. Hope that !tl;dr

ARG Agree to Run Garbage
BDM Branch and Destroy Memory
CMN Convert to Mayan Numerals
DDS Damage Disk and Stop
EMR Emit Microwave Radiation
ETO Emulate Toaster Oven
FSE Fake Serious Error
GSI Garble Subsequent Instructions
GQS Go Quarter Speed
HEM Hide Evidence of Malfunction
IDD Inhale Dust and Die
IKI Ignore Keyboard Input
IMU Irradiate and Mutate User
JPF Jam Paper Feed
JUM Jeer at Users Mistake
KFP Kindle Fire in Printer
LNM Launch Nuclear Missiles
MAW Make Aggravating Whine
NNI Neglect Next Instruction
OBU Overheat and Burn if Unattended
PNG Pass Noxious Gas
QWF Quit Working Forever
QVC Question Valid Command
RWD Read Wrong Device
SCE Simulate Correct Execution
SDJ Send Data to Japan
TTC Tangle Tape and Crash
UBC Use Bad Chip
VDP Violate Design Parameters
VMB Verify and Make Bad
WAF Warn After Fact
XID eXchange Instruction with Data
YII Yield to Irresistible Impulse
ZAM Zero All Memory

Our original backend codebase used so-called "clean architecture" and really put the Java back in JavaScript (actually TypeScript, but hopefully you get my meaning).

For every endpoint I want to create, our design needs at least two classes that are basically callable singletons. If my understanding doesn't fail me, it could have been simple old functions... I think?

They need to get rid of the Cook and employ a Chef.
It used to be creativity, foresight, instinct manifesting itself in great innovative design and software. Now we have everything focused on chasing the $. Just like Microsoft used to be, until that is they realised. Now Apple is the old Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple.
I live in hope.

I guess my story is not really cool, but okay, I lost my job as a Digital designer (Yeah, I actually have a bachelor's degree in graphic design, I'm an impostor)

I lost it because I saved enough money to travel to Japan and I wanted to stay at least a month so the company didn't like it. after coming back I got a job as a content editor, I just copied old content from an old website to a new one, basic html and css, not even responsive design, then I got really into it, and bootstrap came along, the company opened a new department "Front End" so I got in, I learnt responsive design and Jquery, really loved it, I went back to Japan for a month and a half, keeping my job, I liked it, but I quit.

I now work as a remote front end and I feel stuck, I'm very comfortable as remote, don't wanna go back to an office, but it seems I'll have to, can't find any opportunities to improve remotely, and I feel like I'm missing what the "cool kids" are doing.

Did I get old or did I just finish plucking all the low hanging fruit?

When I started on a programming journey about a decade ago everything feel exciting and I learn a lot of things per day (variable,loop,method,class,---etc)

Now a decade later I am more concern with the overall system design,algorithms usage (Big O Notation),how reliable the system it,and how the configurations are set up and how easy is it to change them.

I now notice that I don't really learn anything learn new.Everything feel the same.

Want redundancy? Use more server

Want faster performance? Make a parallel system.

Want program to run on low end device? Think about how memory and storage will be used in system.

Is this a stage everyone went through like puberty? or I am just having a mid life crisis?

PS : I haven't even reach 30 yet but I feel too old.