*yesterday*
Client: "Perfect! How did you do this so quickly?"
Me: "I used a library"
*today*
Me: "I'm still debugging. It will take some time"
Client: "Well, it has already taken too long...I can hear Mozart in the background. Maybe you need to go to a library to get some quiet and get it done fast. Visit the one you used yesterday."
Me: "Library?...Ah, I meant plugin...like, code...a library is a bunch of packaged code"

I think we all can agree that I write perfect code.

Project handover:

"Mmh okay, so what about test coverage?"

Dev: "zero"

Team taking the project "why???"

Dev: "You don't need test if you write perfect code"

Silence in the room... Followed by awkward laugh.

Boss: "Here's our new intern! He's a bloody genius doing apps! Perfect for that important project that shouldn't be trusted to an intern!!"

*takes intern 9 weeks to do a login view without any real backend*

Turns out the guy couldn't do shit but steal others code and change background color.

Boss: "He wasn't very good..."
Me: "You interview him. How about you bring a developer to the interview next time..."
Boss: "Doesn't matter. The app needs to be done the day after tomorrow, good luck"
Me: "............"

*puts on coffee, cries, programs the app in miserable silence*

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@donnico saw your rant about that "perfect code" and remembered of this 😀

!rant
!!git

Who here uses `master` for development?

My boss (api guy) tried to convince me that was normal practice. I gently told him that it sounded crazy and very very bad.

Here's the dev path I'm enforcing on my repos:

(feature branches) -> dev -> qa* -> master -> production*

*: the build server auto-pulls from these branches, and pushes any passing builds to staging/production.

Everyone works on their own feature branches, and when they're happy with their work, they merge it into `dev`. `dev`, therefore, is for feature integration testing. After everything is working well on `dev`, it gets merged into `qa` for the testers to fawn over and beat with sticks. Anything that passes QA gets merged into `master`, where it sits until we're ready to release it. When that time comes (it's usually right away, but not always), `master` gets merged into `production`.

This way, `master` is always stable and contains the newest code, so it's perfect for forking/etc. Is this standard practice, or should I be doing something different?

Also, api guy encourages something he calls "running a racetrack" -- each dev has their own branch (their initials) and they push to that throughout the day. everyone else pulls from it regularly and pushes to their own branch. When anyone's happy with their code, they push from their (updated) branch to `qa` (I insisted on `dev` instead.)

Supposedly this drastically reduces the number of merge conflicts when pushing to an upstream branch due to having a more recent ancestor node?

I don't quite follow that, but it seems to me that merging/pushing throughout the day would just make them happen sooner? idk.

What are your thoughts?

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

An actual quote from a kid in my English Class:

"Because I'm a programmer, everything I make has to be perfect, cause that's what it's like when you work with code".

Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...

Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.

Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.

But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...

My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100

So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...

So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell

Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations

Figuring out the perfect algorithm for your code

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

Yeaah this pretty much sums it up

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

Worked 8 hours on a feature to send attachments from our system (A) to another (B) via B's API. Perfect code, yet I couldn't make it work. B's API has full and extensive documentation for said feature. Contacted B to ask about it, got reply: "Oh yeah - we havent enabled that yet but thought it was handy to have it ready in the docs"

FML

So my company hired a new UX girl last week, today is hers 3rd day at work.
Its 11.30 in the morning, I've been working for couple hours, on my custom module (if you have worked with drupal you know how stoked you are to write your own god damn code once in a while), im blasting some trance through the headphones. It is an early spring and the sky is clear. Perfect day non the less.
Out of nowhere this new UX girl appears near my desk, grabs my tea spoon without even asking and goes to stir her god damn tea. She throws it on the kitchen table without cleaning and goes to her desk.
I got so god damn triggered, this ruined my perfect mood for the upcoming 2 hours. Still cant think of a reason why she would do that, this is just plainly rude.

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

My computer science teacher is very sly: while you are working he stands right behind you for some time, so you start writing good code, functions for everything, perfect indentation... But you don't know if he is still behind you, and you're not brave enough to look back, so you write good code for the rest of the lesson.
What a good prof

Perfect, 100% code-free, Sunday

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

Drove 1.5 hrs for a interview at a company which was developing mgmt software for fire departments. They were very pleased with me, as i am with a volunteer FD and a perfect fit in their opinion. I declined after i found out they code base is mostly VB6 and they considered source control unnecessary.
Thanks, but no thanks.

"Oh hey, your code is a perfect showcase, may I show it to collegues?"

"Sure, but why so?"

"For demonstrating how to do it NOT!"

For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!

Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.

Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?

Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.

Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".

Man I really need to get this off my chest. So here goes.
I just finished 1 year in corporate after college. When I joined, the team I got was brilliant, more than what I thought I would get. About 6 months in, the project manager and lead dev left the company. Two replacements took their place, and life's been hell ever since.

The new PM decided it was his responsibility to be our spokesperson and started talking to our overseas manager (call her GM) on our behalf, even in the meetings where we were present, putting words in our mouth so that he's excellent and we get a bad rep.

1 month in, GM came to visit our location for a week. She was initially very friendly towards all of us. About halfway through the week, I realized that she had basically antagonized the entire old team members. Our responsibilities got redistributed and the work I was set to do was assigned to the new dev (call her NR).

Since then, I noticed GM started giving me the most difficult tasks and then criticizing my work extra hard, and the work NR was doing was praised no matter what. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but lately the truth hit me hard. I found out a fault in NR's code and both PM and GM started saying that because I found it, it was my responsibility to fix it. I went through the buggy code for hours and fixed it. (NR didn't know how it worked, because she had it written by the lead dev and told everyone she wrote it).

I found out lately that NR and PM got the most hike, because they apparently "learnt" new tech (both of them got their work done by others and hogged the credit).They are the first in line to go onsite because they've been doing 'management work'. They'd complained to GM during her visit that we were not friendly towards them. And from that point on if anything went wrong, it would be my fault, because my component found it out (I should mention that my component mostly deals with the backend logic, so its pretty adept at finding code leaks).

What broke my patience is the fact that lately I worked my ass off to deliver some of the best code I'd written, but my GM said in front of the entire team that at this point "I'm just wasting money". She's been making a bad example out of me for some time, but this one took the cake. I had just delivered a promising result in a task in 1 week that couldn't be done by my PM in 4 weeks, and guess what? "It's not good enough". No thank you, no appreciation, nothing. Finally, I decided I'd had enough of it and started just doing tasks as I could. I'd do what they ask, but won't go above and beyond my way to make it perfect.

My PM realized this and then started pushing me harder. Two days back, I sent a mail to the team with GM in cc exposing a flaw in the code he had written, and no one bothered to reply (the issue was critical). When I asked him about it, he said "How can you expect me to reply so soon when it's already been told that when anything happens we should first resolve within the team and then add GM in the loop?" I realized it was indeed discussed, but the issue was extremely urgent, so I had asked everyone involved, and it portrayed him in a bad light. I could've fixed it, but I didn't because on the off chance if it broke something, they'd start telling me that I broke the tool, how its my fault and how its a critical issue I have to fix ASAP, etc. etc., you get the idea.

Can anyone give me some advice of how to deal with this kind of situation? I would have left but with this pandemic going on, market being scarce and the fact that I'm only experienced by 1 year, I don't think I qualify for a job switch just now.

When you spend 15 minutes writing the code, and 4 hours coming up with the perfect name for the class/method/variable

I took a course in app programming and one of the assignments was to create an "instagram-like" photo app with some simple filters. One of them was pixelate.
Instead of changing the RGB value of each individual pixel, i just saved the image in a lower resolution.
The result wasnt perfect, but good enough to pass.
And the teacher never even looked at the code..

I have just thought of the perfect solution when support for fucking ancient IE versions creaps in the requirements (and asking the assholes to produce numbers to support the crazy does not help)

Just do browser detection and if IE < 9 Replace body with one of those winXP alert boxes that tell them there Computer is infected and that they can get a free scan (it's what they are used to anyway). Put a link to the installer of your favourite browser over the entire image.😎

Good news is 100℅ code reuse! Works on every outdated IE and every website that requires IE support.

Yes!! Perfect code weather ☃️

My Perfect Day : Assumption

Woke up at 6. Went for morning walk or do yoga or some sort of stuff.

Came back at 7. Went for daily routine, like bathing and all.

Went to prepare breakfast at 7:45. Prepared some eggs and bread and coffee.

It is 8:15 now. Reading news papers or watching tv and doing breakfast.

At 9 check mails and prepare some stuff.

At 9: 30 went for office. Reached office 5 minute before 10, safe and sound.

Came back at 7 by evening. Did some rest. Prepare dine till 9. Take a bath. Complete the dine.

At 10:30 ready to sleep.

Actual Scenario :

Woke up at 8:30. No time for yoga or morning walk. No time for preparing breakfast as well. Went straight to bathroom. Came back in 20 minutes. Made a cup of coffee. No time for newspaper or tv.

Feeling lazy and tired already. At 9:10 went for office. Before reaching office stopped at fast food joints. buy some junk food. Eat them. Got traffic jam and reached office late.

Started working but feeling lazy. Boss asked twice about the project status and i am unable to think a single line of code.

However, days passed. Boss scolded me. I promised him to finish the work after reaching home.

Reached home at 7:30. Late for no reason. Went straight to bed. Sleeps a hour. But took 20 minutes to leave bed.

Started working on projects i did not complete in the office.

Time fly and it is already 1 in morning. No dinner. Tired as fuck but hungry as well. So made some eggs and eat. Wrapped the task but it is 3:30 in morning and i jumped to bed for sleep.

Loop.

WordPress related, get ready for some disgust.

So today early in the morning my boss forwarded me an email from a client, it was about a bug, and asked me if I can have a look at it and fix it.
"Yaay, WordPress!" I thought and opened the page containing the mentioned bug. She wrote that in the italian version of the page, users can select dates in the calendar, which should be disabled, like in the german version.

So yeah, I opened the code. Everything in the function looked perfect. Really. And the Data was also correctly set in the backend of WP.

The function was only 3 lines of code:

- Get the german post ID of the current post (german or italian) by its ID (using a Polylang function)

- Get an Advanced Custom Fields field by name and from a post with the ID from before

- json_encode its content and echo it to a JS var for initialization and later use in some AngularJS.

No fucking missing semicolon, it was fucking perfect like a sunset with your soulmate.

So I tried to find the bug with my personal way of debugging:

"Shitstream Debugging"
When a creek suddenly is full of water mixed with shit, walk upstream through the turds until you reach clear water. This is where the bug is.

=> So I first looked at the HTML source: Turds.
=> Then the ACF field content: Still turds.
=> Then the ID of the german post: Shit stain and turds (var_dump: null)
=> Please god at least $post->ID? Nope, fart smell and turds.
=> Nothing more to check: Clear fucking water and the flowery smell of 99 devVirgins

So it replaced $post->IT with get_the_ID() and it worked like a charm.

Afterwards I feel stupid, but $post->IT worked all the times before...

Conclusion:
FUCK YOU WORDPRESS YOU UGLY PIECE OF HUMAN-CENTIPEDE-PROCESSED-DOGFART.

Thanks for your patience.
Only one beer was sucked dry during the writing of this fucking rant.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Expectations: I will program like the perfect lover! Fast, strong, safe, and with a passion others only dream of! I will stay up all night loving my code.

Reality: I code like a cheap whore. In fast bouts with whatever personal project will pay me the most in progress. My emotional experience is meh, it is sloppy, the code asks me to do things I don't want to but I say yes to get it to leave me alone, I don't use proper protection, and I am usually working stupid hours.

My JS function is now lazy loading, expressive, and uses 12 fewer lines of code! 😃

It no longer works, but
... no one is perfect. 😅

We made a software for hospitals in my old department. The senior Dev kinda gave me the software, because he thought it sucked and was perfect for a newbie like me. I really loved my work and gave everything I had to improve the quality of software, introduced tests, refactored old smelly code and talked with the product manager to overhaul the ui. Several months later this little shit project the senior gave the newbie, was a huge success and better than any thrash that the senior has created. The senior was really pissed, so everytime I had some days off, he tried to sabotage me in any way. I couldn't take that and many other things anymore, so I left the company. The most tragic part is, that my software could become a massive foundation for the company, but after I left they abandoned it. I still had some good contacts within the old company and they said, that the senior dev told everyone how bad everything was, that I have done through the years and that they can't even describe how bad the architecture of the software is. tl;dr fuck off!! I've done so much things for the company and they never appreciated it. I'm glad I quit that job. Best decision ever!!

The superhuman feeling of going back to your code after a week and it all makes perfect sense, the variable names are intuitive, the doc strings are comprehensive, and the general codebase structure is sensible.

When I was still a noob programmer, I was working on a website for a big client. We had a demo coming up in big city. So we drove there several hours and went to their office. All the management board and shareholders and what not were there.

So we started the demo. Everything had worked perfect the night before. But on that day, we were right away greeted with some stupid PHP error right there on the first page. Had to fix it quickly so we could continue with the demo, so I logged into their production server with SSH and started fixing the code with vim. I was connected to the projector, so my horrid noob code with cringy joke comments was there for everyone in the room to see.

Eventually got it working, but I saw several people in the room facepalming hard. Can't ever forget the day. :D

Hey guys,

this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.

Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.

But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.

I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.

To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.

But unfortunately deceived.

Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.

Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')

I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.

I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...

Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.

This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.

I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.

12:30pm - I can't code any more, what does this function even do?
12:45pm - What's a function?
12:59pm - I still don't know what a function is
01:00pm - *Eats Lunch*
01:05pm - My code makes perfect sense

Being a good developer is knowing how to balance writing perfect code with getting shit done. Working lean means half your stuff in going to die anyway, so fighting for the corpse just wastes everybody's time

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.

The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!

The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.

A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!

Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.

This one was no exception.

This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.

Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!

And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?

An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!

After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.

As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).

And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

As a consultant, you get tasked with a variety of stuff. Last few weeks been struggling to maintain an old C++ application that was written by a complete tool of an a$$hole with zero knowledge on how to write maintainable and production quality code. It would hardly run without a crash. First it was a challenge I had to accept, but as I stabilized the code and just fell over even more traps, I had to admit defeat and review my approach.

Rewrite is something I would choose last, but this one ticked all the marks worthy of a rewrite. So, the customer is a very friendly researcher and gladly spent 15 hours with me explaining all the math and concepts - just a delight for a programmer to have such a customer. Two days in, with a DDD approach - a functional, more precise, faster and stable application.

Sometimes there is no rant to share, it's rare to have that perfect communication with a customer that is so dedicated that he spends so much time teaching you his speciality and actually understand your approach. DDD was really a lifesaver here, by using it's key concepts and ubiquitous language. The program is essentially 8000 lines of math, but wrapping it up with value objects and strong domain models made me understand his domain and him mine. It also allowed me to parallelize the computations, giving me a huge performance boost. Textbook approach, there will not be many like this!

Processing is WHAT?!
So is it just me or is processing like the most fun thing to do with coding ? I mean, it's perfect for relax; it's fun like playing games but it still gives you something.

I've never been so keen to code like I am after weekend with processing. OMG!
And it's not just that you can do everything, understand how M$ Paint/Photoshop does things, understand how games work and how EVERYTHING around graphics works, it's also that there are SO MANY REAAAAALLY GOOD resources that you enjoy ""studying"". Things like pong, game of life, Gaussian blur (the one you use in Photoshop daily, yeah, do you understand how it works ?), Painting or edge detection OR ANY OTHER THING RELATING TO GRAPHICS.

It's simply amazing so if you don't know about it, give it at least 10 minutes(at that point, you'll be programming GTA 6/Photoshop 2 or something..), you won't regret it.

Anyaway, feel free to share your creations!

My code is always perfect! 😂

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

I think Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin should be a must to read.
In school no teacher puts emphasis on code quality.
They should learn how to name variables and functions the right way at an early stage in order to better perfect their craft :)

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

Hey guys.
Arduino + Bluetooth + L293D + car Chacis and 4 DC motors.

Finaly finished my second bot/Drone.
Actually finished it yesterday but had lots of problems with hardware bugs (learned so fucking much in a day).
Tought I fucked two unos with bad soldering... No they are fine, just won't turn on in the circuit that was already working (was fine running the code).
Redone everything from scratch with a arduino uno, it's perfect now.

Funniest part is how I got my hands on a 50€ car kit for almost free... So some Chinese store sended this kit instead of some cheap stuff. Saved another arduino with the chip rack (that one that you can trade the atmega chip), I'll save it to program single chips. Plus a h bridge and lot lot more cool stuff.
Used only the Chacis.
Next: esp8266 and camera... And maby a gun? Would be cool

Agh, holy shit. devRant, I need some love.

I have successfully double-buffered the Windows console (cmd.exe) but all hell breaks loose when you resize the fucking window. The currently active buffer will receive the change in dimensions while the inactive buffer will not, resulting in the window quickly oscillating between the two sizes as the buffers change size.

That got me stuck for about a day. Today, I got it sort of working but it wasn't satisfying at all. I can get it to resize LARGER, but if you resize the window SMALLER, the actual buffer inside the window doesn't change size, so scrollbars appear and I have NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THAT. I somehow need to calculate, or use the API to find, the perfect dimensions (In rows and columns) for the console buffer INSIDE the window buffer for them to not have scrollbars.

And I just - -

I cannot gather the energy to do so right now.

I spent hours finding the solution to this bullshit and ONLY SOLVED HALF MY PROBLEM.

And stack overflow isn't exactly helpful. My problem is so specific that nobody even writes comments on the question.

I guess I need to calculate the amount of characters the screen can hold given the font size and the window size, but fuck, that's a lot of work to do just for something that probably won't even work anyways.

Well, off to the code editor again. Time to inevitably waste my time doing something that won't work.

Yay, programming.

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Meeting yesterday:

Senior E: "Man, every time I do code review I thought this is the stupidest code ever written - then I look at the author, oh wait it's me"

Me: "Well, the perfect code is the code never gets written"

SE: "Casting appreciative look with a nod"

Often I look at my seemingly perfect code 30cm away from screen, mumble "WTF", while asking me why it is not working.
My boss might think I'm retarded...

I’ve just received my Potato Pirate game ! Time to teach my matey how to code ! And the nice Kickstarter gift is perfect for my screen at work ;)

When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.

For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.

The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.

My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.

Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.

However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.

*what*

I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".

I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.

He didn't pass the exam.

Top 3 times:
1) When I amazed myself by solving a problem using recursion.

2) When I taught myself how to make my a restful api and consumed it using Ajax.

3) When I converted a psd in to a responsive pixel perfect webpage.

Writing code makes me feel I am worth something in this world.

How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).

First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.

For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.

It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...

ssh your.server.ip, welcome message:

#Ooops! your files have been encrypted.
#Don't waste your time trying to decrypt them.
#Nobody can.

#We would gladly offer you a way of recovering all
#your files safely, but sadly we lost the decryption
#password.

#Hackers too are not perfect, have a nice day.
#PS. you can still send money to support us if you want at this
#web page: fuckyou.onion.
#Your personal key: m0r0nm0t3fukk3r

(I'll code this one day and install it on somebody machine, it's one of my top dreams)

1. Understand APIs without reading documentation.

2. Write correct code from first try.

3. Know to program in every language.

4. Create the perfect fully functional AI system.

5. Center objects vertically with one line CSS at target object.

Today on "How the Fuck is Python a Real Language?": Lambda functions and other dumb Python syntax.

Lambda functions are generally passed as callbacks, e.g. "myFunc(a, b, lambda c, d: c + d)". Note that the comma between c and d is somehow on a completely different level than the comma between a and b, even though they're both within the same brackets, because instead of using something like, say, universally agreed-upon grouping symbols to visually group the lambda function arguments together, Python groups them using a reserved keyword on one end, and two little dots on the other end. Like yeah, that's easy to notice among 10 other variable and argument names. But Python couldn't really do any better, because "myFunc(a, b, (c, d): c + d)" would be even less readable and prone to typos given how fucked up Python's use of brackets already is.

And while I'm on the topic of dumb Python syntax, let's look at the switch, um, match statements. For a long time, people behind Python argued that a bunch of elif statements with the same fucking conditions (e.g. x == 1, x == 2, x == 3, ...) are more readable than a standard switch statement, but then in Python 3.10 (released only 1 year ago), they finally came to their senses and added match and case keywords to implement pattern matching. Except they managed to fuck up yet again; instead of a normal "default:" statement, the default statement is denoted by "case _:". Because somehow, everywhere else in the code _ behaves as a normal variable name, but in match statement it instead means "ignore the value in this place". For example, "match myVar:" and "case [first, *rest]:" will behave exactly like "[first, *rest] = myVar" as long as myVar is a list with one or more elements, but "case [_, *rest]:" won't assign the first element from the list to anything, even though "[_, *rest] = myVar" will assign it to _. Because fuck consistency, that's why.

And why the fuck is there no fallthrough? Wouldn't it make perfect sense to write

case ('rgb', r, g, b):
case ('argb', _, r, g, b):
case ('rgba', r, g, b, _):
case ('bgr', b, g, r):
case ('abgr', _, b, g, r):
case ('bgra', b, g, r, _):

and then, you know, handle r, g, and b values in the same fucking block of code? Pretty sure that would be more readable than having to write "handeRGB(r, g, b)" 6 fucking times depending on the input format. Oh, and never mind that Python already has a "break" keyword.

Speaking of the "break" keyword, if you try to use it outside of a loop, you get an error "'break' outside loop". However, there's also the "continue" keyword, and if you try to use it outside of a loop, you get an error "'continue' not properly in loop". Why the fuck are there two completely different error messages for that? Does it mean there exists some weird improper syntax to use "continue" inside of a loop? Or is it just another inconsistent Python bullshit where until Python 3.8 you couldn't use "continue" inside the "finally:" block (but you could always use "break", even though it does essentially the same thing, just branching to a different point).

My best code review experience?

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

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

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

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

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

When you type perfect code and your system crashes

Superpower to instantly create variable names every time I need to declare a new variable based on the perfect matching with the code being written..

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

The Setting:

Ola Cabs (One of the biggest competitors of Uber, for those who don’t know) comes to college to recruit software devs:

✅ Pre-placement talk

Now time for the aptitude/code round. Hackerearth used as the solution to run the test and compile code, as well as check the result immediately. Or so I thought.

3 programming questions, 2 hours.

The problem:
Me: *Write the code for the first question* (and I know it’s correct)

Me: Clicks “Compile and run”

Compiler: *Compiling*

*LITERALLY ONE FUCKING HOUR LATER*

Compiler: *Still compiling*

Hackerearth. What a fucking joke. Though the course of the HOUR I waited, I kept questioning the recruiter head from Ola and his response was:

Recruiter: “Try the other program, it’s possibly a problem with your code. I’ll check at my backend also, hold on.”

YOU FUCKING DIMWIT. MY CODE IS PERFECT AND EVEN IF IT WASN’T IT WOULDN’T TAKE MORE THAN A MINUTE (If you’re factoring in absolutely worst cases) TO COMPILE THIS SMALL ASS FUCKING PROBLEM’S CODE.

In the meanwhile I even coded one of the other remaining questions’ solution and the shit still didn’t work.

At the end of the 2 hour time limit, I’d finished code for all 3, the recruiter stops us all from coding and says:

Recruiter: “Just submit your code, we will evaluate it and get back to you.”

Like fucking hell, asshole.

*One hour post interview*

EVERYONE who attempted the aptitude code round (At least 30 of us) receive messages on our phones:

“Unfortunately you did not clear the aptitude round and we will not be able to take your application forward.”

FUCK YOU OLA. IN ONE FUCKING HOUR YOU “EVALUATED” ALL OF OUR CODE? FUCK YOU HACKEREARTH FOR YOUR SHIT FUCKING EXECUTION OF A “SOLUTION”. Maybe test your own fucking product before offering a solution to companies.

Fucking lost opportunity.

When you're a bored college student tired of hearing your boss complain about making the schedule every week so you code a program that sorts each employee into their job categories, stores the days they aren't allowed to work (due to other jobs and or class schedules), the time of day they can't work and any days requested off. Then analyzes who's available for each shift throughout the week alongside categorizing each day of the week by the amount of employees needed and prints a perfect schedule for her to use that week

I'll just start off with how I really feel. Fuck big corporations with their career robots and retarded practices!
Now for a story. So I work remotely for most of the time nowadays, since my company has as clients big corporations. Used to be embedded with said clients, but it became kind of painful to work with them all so I asked to be reassigned to a remote position.
Now for the retarded part: The fucking Klingons I'm working with have two tiers to their VPN, but won't let me have the full version because it would be too fucking expensive. I checked and it's fucking 50 bucks per year difference.
So for that the Klingons are making me code through a remote connection that has a "best effort" priority.
Fuck.
Anyway after 3 weeks of writing code at a 400-600ms latency I finally snap.
I try to use a proxy and it. I write one myself, gets balcklisted in 2 days.
After about another week of writing code through a fuck straw I start working on node socket with 2 clients and a server that encrypts the send data, and syncs 2 folders between my workstation and the remote one.
It's been a month now and it is still working. It's not perfect, but I can at least write code without lag.

Question for you peeps: What shenanigans have you pulled to bypass shit like this?

I was junior developer. My friend recommended me for JavaScript Senior developer in the company he was working. He had settle the interview without asking me. I knew a little of javascript, but I was not ready for this interview at all and I knew that.

So I went to the interview. The questions were very difficult and complex for me, I answered two question of ~15. I was very upset, I was sweаty and blushed ... one of the most uncomfortable moments in my career.

After the questions, the interviewer decided to give me a MacBook to do an exercise with JavaScript to see me in action. The exercise was easy, but MacBook ... Damn it, I saw a MacBook for the second time in my life. I knew the solution of the task, but I was very slow in implementation because of Mac..

After 15 minutes of slow coding and sweating, the interviewer said "OK, just finish it at home and send the code to my email...".

When I got home, I made the perfect solution for 30 minutes and I sent it to him. The only answer was "ok, tnx" and that guy didn't call me anymore.

This is kind of rejection I think ;)

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

Why I don't use Stack Overflow 99% of the time:

Me: I'm not a ruby developer, but I have to write a small script in ruby. I ran into a problem where i'm getting behavior I don't expect. I have a method which expects an array, and when multiple items are passed into it from the command line parser, behaves appropriately, but when only one command line argument is passed, the method breaks because it was passed a single element, not an array of one element. Here's my code, how do I get my desired behavior?

Most highly voted answer: your problem is your passing it a single element and not an array

Question downvoted into oblivion. As if i'm a pleb for not immediately having a perfect grasp of dynamic typing because when I have the choice I stick with strong nominative typing.

"Yesterday "
Client: ''Perfect! How did you do this do quickly? "
Me: "I used a library"
"Today "
Me: "I'm still debugging. It will take some time"
Client: "well, It has already taking too long.... I can hear Mozart in the background. Maybe you need to go to a library to get some quite and get it done fast. Visit the one you used yesterday. "

Me: "library?Ahh... I meant plug in like.... Code, a library is a bunch of packed code. "

When your co developer asks for you to check out her website and tell her any bugs you notice, I then proceed to give her 8 bugs in her code and she freaks out on me lol

Maybe your not as perfect as you think you are....

Absolutely the best quote from Tao Of Programming...

A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs, documents or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of the best programmers in the world. Why is this?"

The Master replied: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has entered the mystery of Tao."

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.

Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)

Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).

Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".

My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."

I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"

Let's try this.

In the project I'm working there is an strict rule : NO COMMENTS!!!

I mean wth, the times I've spend hours trying to understand the crappy legacy code in VB.Net that has been there almost decades, that wouldn't happen with comments, I know i know there are some supernatural developers that think in binary and their eyes work as compilers, but I'm not like that, so seriously go to hell.

P.S. Of course I follow that rule, after all, my code is so damn perfect that even a baby can understand it.

jk

The CTO has admin on the git repo and while we all have to have 2 other people review our pull requests. This guy will just go make a pr and merge it without review. It's not like its perfect code either. I will be going behind him and finding weird shit that he did days later and then go check the git blame. Yup its another one of his had to push it right now without review moments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!rant
if you're someone who grades code, fuck you, you probably suck. Turned in a final project for this gis software construction class as a part of my master's degree (this class was fuck all easy, I had two weeks for each project, each of them took me two days). We had to pick the last project, so I submitted final project proposal that performs a two-sample KS test on some point data. Not complex, but it sounds fancy, project accepted. Easy money.

I write the thing and finish it, it works, but it doesn't have a visualization and that makes the results seem pretty lame, even though its fully functional. SO I GO OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY to add a matplotlib chart of the distribution. To do that, at the very bottom of the workflow, I define a function to chart it out because it made the code way more readable. Reminder, I didn't have to do this, it was extra work to make my code more functional.

Then, this motherfucker takes points off because I didn't define the function at the very beginning of the code... THE FUCK, DUDE? But, noobrants, it's "considered best prac--" nope, fuck you, okay? This class was so shit, not once was code style addressed in a lesson or put on any rubric - they didn't give a shit what it looked like - in fact, the whole class only used arcpy (and the csv mod once), they didn't teach us shit about anything except how to write geoprocessing scripts (in other words, how to read arcGIS docs about arcpy) and encouraged us to write in fucking pythonwin. And now, when the class is fucking over, you decide to just randomly toss this shit in, like it was a specific expectation this whole time? AND you do this when someone has gone out of their way to add functionality? Why punish someone who does extra work because that extra work isn't perfect? Literally, my grade would have been better without the visualization.

I'm not even mad at my grade - it was fine - I just hate inconsistency in grading practices and the random raising and lowering of expectations depending on how some grader's coffee tasted that morning. I also hate punishing people for doing more - it's this kind of shit that makes people A) wanna rip their eyeballs out, and B) never do anything more than the basic minimum expectation to avoid extra unwanted attention. If you want your coders to step up and actually put work in to make things the best they can be, yell at a grader to reward extra work and not punish it.

VR/AR research.

I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.

I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.

All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.

Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.

I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...

!rant this is just a shoutout, how fucking happy I am. Clean code valued over fast but hacky push of features!

Backstory. I work for a startup. Long story short a guy with an idea needed a developer. I've worked for about a year without pay but now since we're live I get paid. Recently a new field of bussiness came up. I told tge guy with the idea (a.k.a. my boss) that we either could just "hack" the current code to just make it "fit" well kind of... Or refactor our main code base, as requirements where changing at least monthly and we just built on top of the monolith.
Don't get me wrong. It still isn't perfect. However I was able to refactor the main business logic for the last few days, as he understood, it's an investment into the future.
Good guy!

P.S. On another note: happiness or happyness? :O

It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.

I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!

We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.

His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.

„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“

When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!

But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.

„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?

That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.

For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left

His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.

Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!

It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.

He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.

Yeah his style

if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}

And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.

And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”

I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings

I'm really into coding now for half a year. I really love that kinda flow when there pop up no errors and you work yourself through the code writing using trial and error. It's really addicting and the perfect evening.
But here comes my question: There are sometimes unsolvable errors for me (still not figuring out how to use firebase properly 😞). Is this stuff going to be fewer as I advance in coding, or am I just terrible at googling? To other beginners: Do you have often errors to that feel unsolvable for you?

Why is web development such a headache?

I'm writing a responsive wesbite from scratch. All goes perfect, even cross browser.
It all works, adapts to screen size etc. Nice! About to get this code into production.

Me: I'll test the iPhone 5 viewport size before I push the code...

Responsive Developer Tools:

FireFox: nu uh, there's a magic random 1px margin to every element on your page now, which you cannot find in your css or in the computed tab. It's magical.

Me: weird, what if I change the viewport size to the iPhone 6's dimensions?

Issue persists.

Me: hmm, what if I add or substract one fucking pixel from the viewport width or height?

FireFox: What 1px margin? Don't know what you're talking about ... There never was one...

Me: ok, weird (sets viewport size back to the iPhone 5 format for testing)

FireFox: I present to you: the magic random 1px margin.

I'm at a loss. I really am. Been clicking and unclicking almost every responsive part of my css I could find for this page and it just doesn't want to work persistently. And I swear to god that it worked a week ago in that exact viewport size. It's so frustrating.

Late night after everyone has slept, switching on all the 3 monitors, reclining on a comfortable chair, fetching some snacks and coffee by the table gives me the perfect mood to code!
There is silence all around 😌

While sitting in a train (5 hours trip) I really want to code something, unfortunately I dont have my laptop with me, so i just connected with ssh from my phone to my ubuntu vps, created some project via npm and use android app to edit the code. It is not perfect but works. Someone else code like that?

I'll tell you the only time... The only times I'll fuck up.

When something changes. That's it.

Nothing else causes me to fuck anything up.

My code gets more and more messy the more people go oh change that ,😐 can that be a capital .... Hold on that box should be smaller

😤😡 Messy = I fuck up.

Now that might well be something I need to work on !

But if you send me twenty emails all with minor things that take seconds to change 😡 I will care less about your project , that makes me lazy.

If you want your project to be perfect on launch .. one plan a couple round of amends maybe 3 and your golden

But I can not keep checking if your application is all good after these minor changes 😐 (these are not situation you can write tests for)

Yes it makes me an asshole I'm aware , but I've been awake 40 hours fixing these peoples work, and quite frankly I couldn't give a toss

From a few years of programming experience, I come to know that "we cannot write perfect code."

What I mean by this is no matter how perfectly you write code, but if you have a peek on that code after about 3 months, you will be like, "I could have done a lot of things in a better way." Provided the code is atleast of 100 lines.

Holy shit, my first freelance project will be field-tested for the first time tomorrow!

After a few more rounds of fixing bugs, some serious improvements, and some new features additions, I can actually say that I'm proud of the code I've written! It's not perfect, but I definitely like the way it works - AND IT ACTUALLY WORKS!

Knock on wood, hopefully it won't shit the bed tomorrow.

Look, I get it. Wordpress sucks. It’s bloated. It’s slow. It’s not elegant. It’s a nightmare to debug and code for. The plugin ecosystem is an insecure, confusing mess of outdatedness and issues.

We can all agree that in a perfect world all power to determine everything about a website, from the code to the content, would be in our power as developers. But we don’t live in a perfect world. People want convenience, even at the cost of performance and security, and they will inevitably resent technologists who refuse to give it to them. We do ourselves and our customers a disservice when we only do what we feel is in our own best interests or preferences and not what will help them with their realities.

Yes, it sucks. Yes, it’s a pain. Yes, it’s in demand and there’s nothing any of us can do to change that.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

There is a constructed language called Tokipona. It was made to be the easiest language, and it only contains like 137 words or so.

This language is a perfect demonstration of “expressivity”. Tokipona is not very expressive. Before you know it, your sentence is obscenely long, and you didn't even convey the full meaning of what you wanted to say.

It's also the case with “easy” programming languages and frameworks. Code quantities rise exponentially, and the more code you have, the more bugs there are. There is no magic. And then you have to debug it. Not so easy, huh?

!rant
Restarted #100daysofcode.
Gonna finish this time no matter what 💪✊.
It's the challenge where you do code every day for 100days.
I am not kinda well right now but it's perfect opportunity
I got the time I always wanted for coding
So no excuses anymore.
Hope you guys also having some adventures​ coding time 😉😂

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

Got hooooot pink coloured pair of beats for my birthday!!! Best gift ever! Two most things I like is music and code this is the perfect gift! Pink is the only problem but fuck it. I love theseeeee!!!

When I was about 10, I used to read these magazines with code listings for programs, and the only things I really understood were these text adventures that I imagined to be of Zork-like quality (gasp!). In reality, it was more like the choose-your-own adventure books of the time (which were actually pretty cool, and had pretty tight memory management). At one time, on a vacation somewhere in the eighties, I got tired of playing in the river with my friends and instead opted to continue writing lines of BASIC in a little paper notebook, inside my parents' car (at 34 degrees C), trying to perfect a storyline about my little brother and his pet dog he got for his most recent birthday, fighting the cat empire etcetera etcetera. Weird looks, good times.

Biggest one is dealing with idiots who break everything. Can’t space anything properly. Oh you needed that function? I got rid of it because it broke my code, and it was easier. Oh yes, just perfect, get rid of a core fucking function you retard that multiple parts of the code rely on. (Luckily it wasn’t pushed to the main, otherwise everything would’ve broken...)

Another one is finishing a damn project, I have like 20 by now... all in different languages that I want to learn. Time comes to work on it? Oh wait, let’s make this because it’s more fun! Just adding more projects to my graveyard.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

When you spend more time renaming variables, class names, properties etc.. to achieve perfect code and patterns rather than actually solving the problem. I'm bored now...

Worst architecture I've seen?

The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).

A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..

- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories

During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.

He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).

That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.

By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.

OpenCL...

Okay so I'm completely new to OpenCL and I just put some stuff together to get a simple GPU Kernel running. Well that worked pretty good.

The reason I got into OpenCL was because I wanted to do some simple SHA1 cracking on my GPU. What I did was, I got a fast implementation of SHA1 from the internet, which works perfect in normal C++, but for OpenCL I have to rewrite some things. So I replaced all the memset and memcpy and so on with simple for loops and it still worked. Now, this should work on OpenCL, too, I thaught. God I was wrong!

Somehow the clBuildKernel got executed normally, but when I try to access the returned value (the error code) I get an Access Violation? It just doesn't make any sense to me?

Well I will try some stuff tomorrow again and I will find a solution for sure, but still, until now I just don't understand it.

I am always perplexed by people who write stuff like: "I don't know why people would use Rust, I simply never write code with bugs in it"

Just, lol

Like, using C or C++ is fine of course, but don't pretend you're perfect and that all of your bounds are checked, all of your allocations are freed exactly once and that you never forget to lock a mutex.

Believe whatever the intern says

WITH A BAG OF SALT

I'm just frustrated. I wanted a simple, statically-typed language that doesn't get in your way and offers GC. I can't find anything "just perfect".

- Go: enforces a style on you, nono.
- Rust: ownership system. I love it, but it's too low level for what I want.
- Scala: seems to have a bunch of useless and bug-prone features.
- Java: I hate how you have to declare and catch exceptions. Good practice, yes, but the code gets bloated with try-catch statements.
- C and C++: Too low level, no GC.
- C#: maybe? idk

I want to make a back-end for an app but I want it to be easy and fast. I need something with a gentle learning curve, not keep fighting the language. I'm between Java and Rust. Java's easier to use. Rust is rust <3, but it's hard, I haven't learned it properly and I just keep fighting the fucking compiler.

Some cheapskate insists on writing a guide to selfhost <software> on Heroku and wants to add it to the official documentation, promising to maintain it (since none of the other devs are using or planning to use Heroku). I volunteer to give them a chance on grounds of it being high quality and maintained by that person in the future which they both promise.
Our docs are written as markdown files on github.

So here we go:
Starts a pull request: uploads their """guide""" as a docx. The content is completely unformatted, basically just an enumerated list.

Tell them to format it as markdown, suggest using github gists.
They go ahead and copy pasta their unformatted list into a gist.txt "allright i made it into gist for ya"

Tell them that they did not format it as markdown.
"sorry updated it in markdown :P"

I look at the file, it is still raw text in a gist.txt. Maybe a bit more spaced out, not that I would care to notice any changes at this point.

Tell them it is still not markdown and link them to a perfect example of another guide that takes advantage of code fragments for commands etc and is properly rendered since it uses .md

"I updated it to the markdown this time XP Can you give me some suggestions on how it looks?"

"How it looks"... "how it LOOKS"... I click the link for the 5th time and IT IS STILL JUST A RAW FUCKING GIST.

Jfc that person has some serious reading/thinking disability. To imagine them to be proactively keeping their guide up to date in the future is absolutely impossible. At that point I pulled out my support for the request since it was already taking more effort to even get a readable version of guide than I estimated for the whole process of adding it.

Oh, and one of the steps originally suggested in the """guide""" was adding the credentials file into the vcs.

I fucking enjoy writing python code, how can a language be so elegant, clean and perfect?

I'm notoriously bad at Git. By that I mean I REALLY REALLY SUCK AT IT. And I have the curse of short memory and an even shorter ability to retain the how-to, muscle memory knowledge of things if too much time passes.

So, I was staring down the gullet of merging two separate repositories onto my local machine and then pushing the result to a remote server. Not having the benefit of someone else to bounce this off of, and always finding the usual Git docs too dense and obtuse, I turned to ChatGPT to help me sort it out.

Guys, where has this been all of my life? I know it's not perfect and it can make mistakes. I knew that going into it, so I made preparations in case this failed. BUT. IT. WORKED! I feel like it has put me into the Star Trek:TNG universe where I can say "Computer, do the thing." and it does that thing. Here's the prompt I used and which it answered perfectly.

"Play the role of a git coach. I have two git repositories. One is on Bitbucket. The other is on GitHub. The branch named "master" on Bitbucket has the latest code. The branch named "master" on GitHub needs to be updated to what's on the Bitbucket "master" branch. Please write the series of git commands that I will need to accomplish this."

An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.

Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:

HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);

And magic happened! The output was:

{1=1, 2=, 3=a}

That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.

I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.

I just don't get the WordPress hate or CMS hate in general. Using these is not perfect, but neither is _anyone's_ code. Get over that and be more productive for your client. Unless you're the best coder the world has ever seen, and you're _always_ available to push content for an organization of 90 or 900 or 9,000 people, nobody CARES about your "coding purity". They want a website that they can still operate if your ass gets hit by a bus. Don't like WP? Find a CMS that ticks most of the boxes for your client's needs. If you have the time, budget, and long-term inclination to provide bug fixes for it, write your own Awesomesauce Custom CMS(TM) and release it to the open source community so we can finally replace WordPress with the next best thing.

Otherwise, launch site, get check. Repeat until you can retire.

Back in college, we were assigned a group of 3 other students to complete a duplicate of a current popular site. My team received Kijiji, a Canadian ad listing platform similar to Craigslist/eBay. This was to be done with JSP and JavaEE. We had to create a 30 minute presentation to go along with it.

Fairly simply, except we had one week. As I worked 2 jobs at the time, I typically left my college work to the last minute. Initially, we split up the work, myself taking 50% of the code and splitting the rest between the other 3. I was perfectly okay with this, until the night of the last day, they messaged me saying they had done nothing.

Extremely annoyed, I told them to just do the fucking presentation and that I would now finish the other 50% of the code myself. I coded 16 hours straight, went to bed, woke up and coded for another 8 hours. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it covered all the points.

The day of, they showed me their presentation. It was complete trash. When we ended up presenting, I improvised the entire thing. The others didn't even speak. Not once. At the end of it, we received 65%. The professor said that if the project had been completed by one person, it would've received a perfect grade, but because there were 4 of us, he expected more. They all looked at me in fear of saying something. I just thanked the professor for his time and left.

The professor knew I did the entire thing myself. My code was by far the most consistent in his class, constantly receiving perfect marks and him asking me to assist other students.

When I graduated, I didn't have 100%, but I did have a 90%. Considering that project was worth 25% of our final marks, he definitely bumped my grade.

If there was an IDE which combines Xcodes debugging with Android Studios code completion, that would be an almost perfect IDE!

In Xcode you don‘t have to start the debugging process explicitly, you just set breakpoints while the app is running. Thats so much better than in Android Studio where you have to switch from normal running to debug mode.

In Android Studio you can use a function which is not declared yet and if you declare it afterwards, it is recogniced and can be completed by the code completion. Xcode does not know shit about undeclared funtions...

All software sucks, I overheard a colleague say. I used to be proud of what I wrote, but after 20 years I realize that I am never going to write perfect code. It may be good enough, but if that's all, than my colleague may be right. What a relief :)

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

Ugh time for my first google chrome rant... thing...

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, finished an arch linux install, fixed my slow internet connection in linux, installed only the things I need, vs code and google chrome but fuck me!

Google chromes performance is sinking like a rock, dropping about 25-40% of frames in youtube, slow page loading and the sort.

Installed firefox to ensure it wasn't my system and its all running perfect, I don't like using firefox and want to go back to the warmth of chrome, anyone able to help on this one :-(

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

Context: New to typescript. Writing a thing, doing it for work, good opportunity to stretch my dev legs. Using a propriety lib, alternatives not an option.

Rant begin:
SOOOO, who the fuck thought THIS was a good idea:
1. Lib has minified react in dev (because closed source) meaning no downstream errors AND the entire premise of the lib is that a widget is a react component, so I'm writing typescript react the entire time without downstream errors
2. SHIT docs. By that, I mean there's an API reference page that's so sparse there's literally a set of CRUCIAL interfaces that only say the word 'Interface' on them. That's it. that's what i get. It's an interface. NO FUCKING SHIT SHERLOCK, what the fuck is it though? What's its purpose? Is it an interface for a dog? A dog that has a 'shit' property? or a cat? or a cat eating dog shit? Nobody fucking knows - the docs sure as fuck don't care.
3. No syntax highlighting - editors, IDEs (i've tried a few) can't even find the lib inside this environment, so Code and everything else thinks I'm importing shit that doesn't even exist - so no error prediction, code completion based on syntax of the library, none of that.
4. There are some EXTREMELY basic samples - these samples exclusively use React classes - no function components, no hooks, nada - just classes and even perfect replicas of the sample code display erratic behavior like errors about missing props, so that's mostly FUCKING USELESS
5. And this... this is where the straw breaks the fucking camel's back... there's no... there's no hot reloading... Do you know what that (in conjunction with the previous 4 fuckups) means?

When I write anything or I fuck up (which of course I'm doing every time I write half a line because how the fuck?) I have to restart the client and server EVERY FUCKING TIME and manually test to see if the error (THAT ONLY GETS REPORTED IN THE LOCAL UI) is gone or different.
Then, once I see the error, it isn't an error: it's the minified React error-decoder link and guess what? It isn't really clickable a link OR copyable, meaning that every FUCKING time I get a new error, I have to MANUALLY TYPE A FUCKING 50 CHAR URL TO FIND OUT A GENERIC REACT ERROR MESSAGE WITHOUT A LINE NUMBER OR ANY FUCKING CONTEXT. I HAVE TO DO THIS CONSTANTLY TO SEE IF ANYTHING I'M DOING EVEN WORKS.

6. There's no github to complain to the maintainers or search for issues because it's NOT FUCKING OPEN SOURCE so there is literally nothing to be fucking done about it.

This is due in a week and a half, found out about it last Friday. How's your day going?

PS: good to be back after a long respite from dev ranting.

My biggest influence on coding style is:
"If code make reviewer puke, code bad."

In all seriousness though, I think the biggest influence is seeing messy code and not trying to replicate that.
I think every code file, however ugly it is, tells you a story. Maybe the coder was less experienced, maybe it was written during crunch or the coder is an enterprise software engineer who has to make a factory for everything and everything is generic.
In my opinion there is no perfect code style. You do what's required and hopefully in your best ability, and, as a bonus, think of the person who has to look at your code next...

For me it's kind of hard to tell whether my code is good. I have no reviewer in the company, which brings the risk of writing code so only you understand it... but so far it has worked and I've definitely seen worse than my 1 year old files. 😄

How do you explain to your client that no, you cannot have a perfect solution, because the algorithm is O(2^n)?

I mean, without requiring him to get a degree in CS. Also without making him think that you can't build efficient code because you're dumb. Or that the hardware is slow.

Bad dev habit: code first, ask questions later.

Other than that I'm pretty much perfect <3

I'm not perfect. I've made fuckups. But most of the fuck ups I've made have been in unimportant code that wasn't used by anyone (part of the reason I'm not super happy with my job but whatever). But I've just found a fuckup that was in code that did matter...

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

best teacher? i wont really consider it teaching but it had really helped me a lot in my 1st year of programming.

me: *sends an email* hey i dont really understand how to do this part
teacher: i dont really know how to explain it so i coded it myself *sends me code*
me: oh thanks! *copy paste to mine*

after a week:
I GOT A PERFECT SCORE!! but ofc now i dont trust the teacher's code anymore. i deal with my own code.

A company I work with are reluctant to change their hosting provider until the end of their hosting term. (Which may be a perfect reason as it's paid for)

The website goes down everyday!!!! Not to forget it's a popular magazine website!

Here are the new relic emails at 1 minute intervals:
- HTTP 500 Response Code
- HTTP 508 Response Code
- NetworkError: Read timed out
- Connect to domain:80 failed: connection timed out

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

At first glance, this week's group rant seems perfect for me since I have drunk coded at least 2 to 3 times per month (my TGIFs are usually followed by Saturday morning demo meetings).

However I cannot say I have had any particular "worst" code that I have done so far.

Yea I once formatted and installed some linux distro while drunk and couldn't remember the login info the next morning.

Yea I once exported, imported between dbs from prod and local while drunk and lost this and that data.

Yes I once decided to organize my repositories and somehow deleted some repos without any backup while I was drunk.

I was fine. I somehow solved my way out by either bullshitting or being quiet or fixing without any sleep. Most of the times nobody really comprehend the extent of my actions. So I was fine. Hence I really don't have any particular worst drunk coding experience yet.

Best drunk coding experience?
Well I do not agree that coding while drunk is a pleasurable or fun thing to do. So I don't really have that either.

This week's topic is actually a very tough one although it might seem easy.

The code will not:
* bad-mouth
* lie
* let down
* abuse
* cheat
* bully
* kill
* run away

The code brings people together no matter if someone has the brain power of protozoa or is the next Euclid. The code is pure with a passive buff to become as perfect as possible. It's the new math for the future world. The code is love, the code is life.

That's why I love (to) code. And you?

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

My last job I worked with one other dev, she always thought her code was PERFECT and the way she did things PERFECT, she enjoyed pointing out flaws in my code or web sites in our big marketing meeting with out executives. Yeah won't miss her one bit

Evening: I have no idea how to do it, 4 hours of programming are just wasted.

Morning: Oh, I changed couple lines in yesterday code and everything is perfect now.

So, this is my first actual rant since I joined devRant and I am not saying I am perfect either. Here goes nothing...
1. I honestly hate it when people use spacebar instead of tabs
2. People who have a bad indentation or no indentation at all (even though almost all IDEs have auto-indentation). The bad thing is when a person asks me to have a look at their code I always end up wasting time fixing the indentation rather the actual problem.
I love a properly indented code and that's one of the major reason I usually recommend Python to most people.
3. Lastly, people who leave lots of unnecessary empty lines. E.g.,

public class HelloWorld{

public static void main(String[]args){

System.out.println("Hello world!");

}

}