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My bosses, bosses, boss asked to call me up unexpectedly:
BBBoss:" Just wanted to say we are really happy with your performance, especially in these tough circumstances, ... "
Me thinking: "Ah, great I am getting laid off."
BBBoss: " ... which is why we decided to give you and extra 1000$ in you next paycheck."
Me: "??? ... for real."
BBBoss: "yes, thank you for your hard work."
Me: "I am still employed?"
BBBoss (laughs) :"Yes, we are happy to have you."7 -
Got together with my old dev team (5) who all left the same company at the same time almost two years ago. (Thats a whole other story).
One of them told us he left and went to a new company that measured performance by the amount of commits a dev would to per day. Of course he didn't know that when he signed on.
Three months into the job he had a week where his first commit wasn't until a wednesday and he got called in by the manager to explain his lack of commits and how he was going to improve.
He quit on the spot. Had a new job in less than a week.
Other devs at the company were fixing typo's and just commiting them one at a time to create a lot of commits.11 -
#2 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
Back before we utilized stored procedures (and had an official/credentialed DBA), we used embedded/in-line SQL to fetch data from the database.
var sql = @"Select
FieldsToSelect
From
dbo.Whatever
Where
Id = @ID"
In attempts to fix database performance issues, a developer, T, started putting all the SQL on one line of code (some sql was formatted on 10+ lines to make it readable and easily copy+paste-able with SSMS)
var sql = "Select ... From...Where...etc";
His justification was putting all the SQL on one line make the code run faster.
T: "Fewer lines of code runs faster, everyone knows that."
Mgmt bought it.
This process took him a few months to complete.
When none of the effort proved to increase performance, T blamed the in-house developed ORM we were using (I wrote it, it was a simple wrapper around ADO.Net with extension methods for creating/setting parameters)
T: "Adding extra layers causes performance problems, everyone knows that."
Mgmt bought it again.
Removing the ORM, again took several months to complete.
By this time, we hired a real DBA and his focus was removing all the in-line SQL to use stored procedures, creating optimization plans, etc (stuff a real DBA does).
In the planning meetings (I was not apart of), T was selected to lead because of his coding optimization skills.
DBA: "I've been reviewing the execution plans, are all the SQL code on one line? What a mess. That has to be worst thing I ever saw."
T: "Yes, the previous developer, PaperTrail, is incompetent. If the code was written correctly the first time using stored procedures, or even formatted so people could read it, we wouldn't have all these performance problems."
DBA didn't know me (yet) and I didn't know about T's shenanigans (aka = lies) until nearly all the database perf issues were resolved and T received a recognition award for all his hard work (which also equaled a nice raise).7 -
Behold the PHP pyramid of doom!
You know what kind of code is coming... a big pile of shite! 😍
Obviously you have to return by reference (&) because of performance and memory reasons. ☝️🤓
Man... I've seen code...
23 -
Like "Why is Facebook webpage running so slow" (I think cuz of all the tracking stuff, and they are having trouble on my Linux machine). But I gave it a naive duck-duck and found this brilliant tip to "Reinstall JavaScript" to improve that performance. I'm just so speechless rn... And the cherry on the ice-cream is the link :D
13 -
While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."
... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.
How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?
Fuck these people, seriously.8 -
Consequences Associated with Burnout:
- sleep deprivation ✅
- change in eating habits ✅
- increased illness due to weakened immune system ✅
- difficulty concentrating and poor memory/attention ✅
- lack of productivity ✅
- poor performance ✅
- avoidance of responsibilities ✅
- loss of enjoyment ✅
Have I just been burnt out and living it as my norm for the past 5 years? 🤡3 -
The worst part about being a web developer is when clients ruin a perfectly good website by asking for dumb things, even though you told them it's either:
a) near impossible
b) not useful/helpful to users
c) deprecated/no longer used code/techniques
e) will harm performance and SEO
d) just plain stupid8 -
Oh, nice. Now Windows 11 doesn't just fuck up AMD CPUs with lack of performance, but also SSDs. NTFS at its finest, but see the tags.23
-
Ah the day before launch of a new app. And right on schedule the businesses is attempting to completely alter their requirements including a COMPLETE OVERHAUL OF THE DATABASE MODEL TO ADDRESS AN ISSUE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN FIXED. I wish they would share the drugs they are clearly on so I could also live in this dreamland delusion where you can turn something completely on its head right on the finish line and expect everything to go well.
Manager: Hey I think I have a solution to that performance we talked about last week
Dev: I already fixed it, it only takes 1 second instead of 30 now.
Manager: Ok but I’ve also figured out a solution. If we completely change the entire database model that one query could potentially be even faster according to my understanding of how databases operate.
Dev: I fixed it without the need for that, actually it was just a matter of better conc—
Manager: I think we should go with MY solution. Drop everything and restructure the database immediately! Be quick, as you know we launch this application tomorrow! Have an extra coffee today and just crush it out, don’t overthink this either just do it.
Dev: …11 -
I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.9 -
Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.
Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.
What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.
Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck
We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.
By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.
In a department wide meeting:
DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"
Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.
Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."
Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.10 -
wE oNlY uSe 10% oF bRaIn pOwEr
yeah, no shit, now go to your computer and launch 400 chrome tabs. Congrats, now you're using 100% of your computer performance. Does it work well now? Quick and snappy innit?
fucking muppets.16 -
Oh dear, a scaling problem I solved was replacing some Regex matching with simpler string functions. While I'm a huge fan of Regex, it's unreal how much performance they can suck out of some high-n loops...
I got about 120x out of some critical code thus making a CPU upgrade unnecessary.8 -
I worked once in a company which had this tourist app which should show places on map of the city. Unfortunately it slowed the App down to load more then a couple of places. Their solution was to limit the number of loaded places to teb and prohibited zomming out. I made it handle thousands of places at the same time. Main reason for the Performance issue was, that they sent all data they had about places big, big json objects with large text blobs) to the frontend. This part was easy, I instead sent only the data needed for the map like coordinates and icon type obviously. But still the backend struggeled hard with many objects from the DB, because they built a really shitty orm or what ever this was supposed to be: every line of data retrieved from the DB was immideatly wrapped in some class wich direved from another class which had some magic methods in it which caused some absurd loops over all other obejcts and even more DB queries in unexpected moments and also in the fucking constructor. So it turrned out that the map issue was only the top of the iceberg, since using any data from the DB was extremely expensive. The hard part was to understand the insaness of this abnormination and find the bottlenecks.8
-
I'm having an existential crisis with this client.
We are spending millions of $s every year to make sure the product's performance is perfect. We are testing various scenarios, fine-tuning PLABs: the environment, application, middleware, infra,... And then we provide our recommendations to the client: "To handle load of XX parallel users focusing on YY, yy and Zy APIs, use <THIS> configuration".
And what the client does?
- take our recommendations and measure the wind speed outside
- if speed is <20m/s and milk hasn't gone bad yet, add 2x more instances of API X
- otherwise add 3xX, 1xY and give more CPUs to Z
- split the setup in half and deploy in 2 completely separate load-balanced prod environments.
- <do other "tweaking">
- bomb our team with questions "why do we have slow RTs?", "why did the env crash?", "why do we have all those errors?", "why has this been overlooked in PLABs?!?"
If you're improvising despite our recommendations, wtf are we doing here???
One day I will crack. Hopefully, not sometime soon.3 -
Once upon a time
Performance Review, "great job", "like all your achievements so far".. signed.
Two days later, same manager, "as you can guess, you didn't pass probation. Could have done more."
"Oh more like?"
"Just, you know, more."3 -
So today, again, I discovered the importance of unitests.
I was solving this performance issue, in which we had a few update actions for multiple entities in mongo, but it took FOREVER to complete, even when I unified it into one bulkWrite command.
Since the unified write did improve performance slightly, and we wanted to move on, we decided to let this bug go.
So there I was committing my changes when I got a rejection from the pre-commit hook since I didn't have enough unitests coverage.
Ok, let's start writing some unitests.
Some unitests also needed to test the bulk write. So there I was comparing expected with actual result, and suddenly I got a huge facepalm.
Apparently some rogue for loop iterated all entities again for each entity that needed update. So instead of getting one update per entity, I got N identical update commands per each of the N entities 🤦♂️
Needless to say, fixing this fixed the performance bug entirely.
Thank you unitests and pre-commit hooks!2 -
that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?14 -
it is really frustrating not to be able to actually maintain and improve the code you're working with. i'd be happy to completely dig in and live in the code and get it all - not so much fucked up - , or, totally spitballing here, do some research on how we could improve the functionality and performance in general (which is not "nice to have", but rather ongoing customer pain points), but I'm not allowed to, because management hates having maintainable code or even an adequate number of devs. it rather has me doing hippity hoppity between different projects to make sure nothing gets my full attention. -.-
the only thing i can do is to clean it up a bit during bug fixes, but even heavy polishing won't fix this giant pile of garbage that is called our code base.2 -
I'm a perfectionist and like things done the right way, but had to learn to let go and remind myself it's the clients site and their choice. No amount of logic and reasoning is going to stop a hellbent client from wanting the dumb things they want, even when it's bad for design, performance, usability and/or SEO.1
-
So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash -
I’ve got the cold from hell and my last years performance review to write.
These things are fucking terrible and every time I read a cheesy corporate competency that I have to prove, I feel slightly sick.
Just got to find a way of saying ‘I spent the last year doing just enough not to get fired’ and make it sound like I’ve reinvented the wheel.
Think I might be looking for a new job soon.1 -
“We mob every thing so that means we don’t need pull requests, because by the time the code is committed it’s had plenty of pairs of eyes on it”
Well, I beg to differ.
Today I read through some of this spaghetti mobbed code to look into a performance issue. Wasn’t supposed to but bored stiff so I ‘went dark’ and did it without the mob.
After about an hour I figured out it runs a few lines of dubious code and if there’s an error it tries many times over with an exponential back off.
And each run of the methods will fail for sure because of how it’s written.
Someone must’ve seen this problem but instead of realising it can never work, they’ve wrapped it in retries and back offs.
So many back offs and retries that it just sits there doing this for 25 minutes.
But yeah. The mobbing works great guys, keep churning out this quality code. 😂😂😂
Can’t wait to see the back of this joke job.4 -
2021 was really rough, saw friends going over the deep end with burnout, significant incidents to handle and a shitty manager to deal with.
It wasn't about blood and tears, it was about commuting 4 hours/day mid-pandemic to be present in the office and respond to an incident whilst having to deal with a bunch of heroes thinking they were part of a CSI: Cyber episode.
All of that just to be said that my raise "would be enough to keep me from looking elsewhere" as my manager said they were very happy with my performance.
This week I found out exactly how much this appreciation is worth: 2%. And I should consider myself lucky with this number as my performance wasn't good enough to grant me any raise whatsoever.
feelsreallybad.png4 -
I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.
One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .
My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:
1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)
2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))
Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.
When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"
So I messaged the CEO ...
Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?
CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.
Me: and how does one maximize value?
CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!
Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)
CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>
I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...
So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.
Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...
You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.
%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.4 -
I'm lucky enough to be able to work with an extremely competent yet down-to-earth and generous senior engineer that it's a pita to write his review abt "area in which he can improve" - the dude already wrote 1/2 the codebase to keep the team running.1
-
Hey! This is a followup to my last story.
TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.
First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.
Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.
One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.
The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.
I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.
Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.
Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...
Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.
One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.
I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...2 -
In a continuation of my previous rant:
Alright KVM is running.
First devrant post from my Windows inside my Linux with dedicated pass-through graphics card. So far, looks like it's working.
Installing Horizon Zero Dawn to gage gaming performance. But it looks promising. With a stylish button on desk that switches between Windows and Linux.2 -
I don't care about God's existence but somehow I'm meeting the deadlines always. It's a new thing for me.
I have stopped paying attention to my work due to interviews and somehow my work performance is getting better and better each day.
All I needed was to work less and give estimation according my mood each day.8 -
Here is a weird fact I have been thinking about this evening:
Helio X20 was the only mainstream ARM processor that had 10 CPU cores. It was first introduced in 2015, however no more ARM processors with high core count were used since then..
Nowadays smartphone processors have `8` cores max 🤔🧐
I guess 8 cores the reasonable limit for smartphones. Must have something to do with cost-to-performance factor5 -
does my co-worker code is actually really necessary, for the sake of arguments lets ignore server performance, and focus on this snippet.
added comment on the side of the parameters
12 -
There’s immense power in being perceptive to what your business prioritizes for the rank and file versus what the business prioritizes for *itself*.
Like for example pushing to get individual performance reviews done with an exceeding pressure of a certain drop dead date while suddenly but simultaneously relaxing of any similar immediacy of completing management reviews.
🧐
Talk amongst yourselves.3 -
I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks? -
Was told at work today that I don’t follow directions closely enough and the lack of attention to detail in my work is a problem.
I remember being this way since my first elementary school teacher pointed it out to me. I’ve always been this way. It’s how my brain is wired. No matter how hard I try, I always miss something. Especially when it is a really complex set of tasks. I’ve literally got the results of a cognitive test I took in college documenting and quantifying my working memory deficits.
You think you’ll change that now, after more than four decades of me being like this, with a performance review? Good fucking luck!8 -
I’ve been very unlucky, undertalented, or underfunded with scaling issues. Can’t think of a time I ever successfully scaled a website or application to a faster performance because of any or all of those three factors.1
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In most businesses, self-proclaimed full-stack teams are usually more back-end leaning as historically the need to use JS more extensively has imposed itself on back-end-only teams (that used to handle some basic HTML/CSS/JS/bootstrap on the side). This is something I witnessed over the years in 4 projects.
Back-end developers looking for a good JS framework will inevitably land on the triad of Vue, React and Angular, elegant solutions for SPA's. These frameworks are way more permissive than traditional back-end MVC frameworks (Dotnet core, Symfony, Spring boot), meaning it is easy to get something that looks like it's working even when it is not "right" (=idiomatic, unit-testable, maintainable).
They then use components as if they were simple HTML elements injecting the initial state via attributes (props), skip event handling and immediately add state store libraries (Vuex, Redux). They aren't aware that updating a single prop in an object with 1000 keys passed as prop will be nefarious for rendering performance. They also read something about SSR and immediately add Next.js or Nuxt.js, a custom Node express.js proxy and npm install a ton of "ecosystem" modules like webpack loaders that will become abandonware in a year.
After 6 months you get: 3 basic forms with a few fields, regressions, 2MB of JS, missing basic a11y, unmaintainable translation files & business logic scattered across components, an "outdated" stack that logs 20 deprecation notices on npm install, a component library that is hard to unit-test, validate and update, completely vendor-& version locked in and hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars.
I empathize with the back-end devs: JS frameworks should not brand themselves as "simple" or "one-size-fits-all" solutions. They should not treat their audience as if it were fully aware and able to use concepts of composition, immutability, and custom "hooks" paired with the quirks of JS, and especially WHEN they are a good fit. -
Anyone else get frustrated by the dust that sits on top of your computer?
Fuck me but I fucking hate this dusty shit, keep cleaning the screen and the keypad but oh well, next time I open there it is - all in its glory.
And there's this fucking constant worry that shit that dust might've gotten inside the laptop and now the performance is gonna fuck up.
SO FUCKING IRRITATING AARGH3 -
going back to my personal windows laptop till the time new company provides me a new mac, i gotta say i missed this. I don't know, but i think i can never be a extreme mac os or linux fan as much as i like windows (even though my next personal laptop is also going to be a macbook for sure)
mac has the best performance out there when running emulators or heavy intellij ides, but the user experience in windows is 💋💋
i missed how my cursor ran like a tiger on arrow keys press, the ability to create files on right click, having multiple hard drives and organising my files/folders there, being able to control program locations... all these stuff is cool to me. when i was using ubuntu , i could surely do all these stuff too, but it still felt a little unpolished.
i know am about to get roasted in the comment section. so let's begin 😂3 -
So I’m tryina put together a resume and I see a lot of dev résumé talking about increased revenue from x to y or user base from z to w.
What I don’t understand is while yes the user base did increase from z to w it wasn’t just you that caused it. The entire company was working hard at it to get there so why are u claiming that it was you. And apparently recruiters love these kpis that u make out of your ass.
Should I give in and just put them in there anyway?
I worked in a startup so my job didn’t really have a definition of what to be told to do and do I had to deal with building front end with vue to figuring out how to automate our deployment flow and it’s really hard to quantify my performance like sure 3000 tickets solved but u don’t know what portion of them were full blown features what portion was just a one liner.2 -
Should I become the CEO of Xerox, I pledge to rename the company to "Jerome Inc.", and naming our highest performance printing machine "Powell".
Also, I'm going to legally change my name to William "Bill" Printer.1 -
Using LSP for a while now, of course, being also a NeoVim user, particularly attached to Vim's coding approach, I can't help but notice Microsoft's Language Server Protocol to be A LOT like Emac's editor approach to writing code. Was Emacs right all along? More so, have we actually slowed down software advancement by distancing ourselves from LISP-like languages, putting speed above ergonomics and marginalizing many would-be contributors that have more LISP-like thinking? I wonder a lot about the future of writing code and the importance of, at least pseudo, artificial intelligence in that future. As we all know how easy it is to write pseudo-ai code in LISP-like languages, have we also delayed artificial intelligence by distancing ourselves from LISP-like languages? But more importantly, IS IT TOO LATE? I mean, should we, instead of try "forcefully evolving" JavaScript, instead devise nem ways of coding with it that makes it more Scheme-like? This is a rent, but also a heart breaking moment for me, a devotee of languages like Rust, I can't stop, but wonder if my preferred language's perceived advances aren't only an actual coming back of LISP. Finally: it's heartbreaking to me that I just can't have a small sized Emacs distribution with Vim-like capabilities. Being actually able to kind of talk to your editor like emacs users could be a BIG improvement on developer's declining mental health stats.
ps: I'm not a natively English speaking person, please forgive tipos and other pedantic writing mistakes.
On another example of regressing for advancemente, the interested reader should read about performance differences and justification for it between grep and perl's regex implementation. -
Any one played around with type one hypervisor booting multiple OS , what is the performance hit ( it has to be lower, right ? As compared to native boot)2
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