> in da zone, headphones beating, caffeine rushing through my veins, snack-stack at 75%, code and commands flowing like campaign promises, I'm one with the keyboard... I can feel it ~(◉_◉)~

roomie: Hey J! J!
me: ಠ_ಠ I'm kinda busy, what do you want?
roomie: Dude don't forget to pick up bla bla bla
me: Okay
> Headphones back on, feeling the h4ckx0r fire resurge through my gut like a majestic phoenix (not to be confused with taco tuesday gut fire)
roomie: J...J! dude also make sure bla bla bla
me: ಠ╭╮ಠ I know, you don't need to be so specific with me.
> Headphones on...about to hit play again...
roomie: Dude do you happen to know bla bla bla

(ಥ﹏ಥ)
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

FUCK! just tell me everything at once so I can go back to ignoring you and the irrelevant world around me!

I hate when people do this.

Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.

That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.

So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.

Management has been promising we'd leave .NET framework for 2 years now. Never fucking happens. A new ASP.NET project was just started last week and yup, OF COURSE, its .NET Framework 4.8.

I'd even be happy with one of the earlier .NET Core versions at this point for fucks sake. I have no clue why tech leads are so happy to create a brand new project on a deprecated framework version.

And yes, I have checked thoroughly. Our whole infrastructure works with .NET Core onward. People are just too lazy to learn new stuff.

Stuff like switching to .NET 6, actually doing unit testing, improving our CI/CD pipeline, refactoring problematic codebases, etc. -> all this stuff is the kind of things they promise me I can work on later whenever I'm so bogged down with work that I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. All empty promises.

Ideally we should be on .NET 6 since its LTS and just stay on the LTS versions as the year goes on.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

I have already done like 3 internships of 6 months now. And all the companies sucked!

Now the current company I work at is at least not a marketing company filled with cocaïne sniffing callcenter junkies. But why do they always lie so much. They promised free food and drinks and code reviews. What I get is a computer with an i5 and a fucking Jira account.

This is fucking annoying me, im hungry, thirsty and somebody should really check the code im about to push because it cant be good!!!

After I finished my probation of 3 months, which was also almost 3 months ago I noticed that Im doing better than half of the team so I asked my manager for a raise of 43 percent. Was given the green light but havent actually received the raise and was being fed excuses and promises . Started applying, got a better offer and gave my notice today. Suddenly hes shitting bricks and wants to talk with me tomorrow and asks me not to accept that offer yet. I smell a counter offer. Fucking lazy cunt couldnt move his ass for 3 months now all of a sudden hes my best friend. Seriously this sounds like a cliche but its surreal to see a respected person do this stuff, I guess all of the managers are the same even if they seem different in the start?

Best part is that Im not even a big contributor or even own some big features in that company. Ive been here 6 months only. He says he sees potential but tbh Im just a regular guy who crunches tasks and asks questions. I come in to the office only twice or three times a month. Seriously idk what he sees in me. Anyways.

I'm not a dev, but I visit this site due to its overwhelming sanity. That said, I have two bests:

First: Never thought I'd say it, but having Windows as opposed to Mac has continued to keep me from going batshit cray. I liken my relationship with Mac to a marriage that started out wonderfully and wound up in a field of acrimony, broken promises, and literal hatred.

Second: This site, as mentioned above.

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!

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

This was initially a reply to a rant about politics ruining the industry. Most of it is subjective, but this is how I see the situation.

It's not gonna ruin the industry. It's gonna corrupt it completely and fatally, and it will continue developing as a toxic sticky goo of selfishness and a mandatory lack of security until it chokes itself.

Because if something can get corrupted, it will get corrupted. The only way for us as a species to make IT into a worthy industry is to screw it up countless times over the course of a hundred years until it's as stable and reliable as it can possibly be and there are as many paradigms and individually reasonable standards as there can possibly be.

Look around, see the ridiculus amount of stupid javascript frameworks, most of which is just shitcode upon vulnerabilities upon untested dependencies. Does this look to you like an uncorrupted industry?

The entire tech is rotting from the hundreds of thousands of lines of proprietary firmware and drivers through the overgrown startup scene to fucking Node.js, and how technologies created just a few decades ago are unacceptable from a security standpoint. Check your drivers and firmware if you can, I bet you can't even see the build dates of most firmware you run. You can't even know if it was built after any vulnerability regarding that specific microcontroller or whatever.

Would something like this work in chemical engineering? Hell no! This is how fucking garage meth labs work, not factories or research labs. You don't fucking sell people things without mandatory independent testing. That's how a proper industry works. Not today's IT.

Of course it's gonna go down in flames. Greed had corrupted the industry, and there's nothing to be done about it now but working as much as we can, because the faster we move the sooner we'll get stuck and the sooner we can start over on a more reasonable foundation.

Or rely on layers of abstraction and expect our code to be compilable on anything the future holds for us.

I just bumped into a javascript problem that exceeds the stupidity of previous ones:
Because promises can be retained after they settle, and handlers attached thereafter are pushed on the microtask queue, a promise rejection can't be asserted to be unhandled until the promise in question is GC'd.
Of course this is nuts so engines will conclude that a promise rejection is unhandled if there are no handlers at the moment of rejection.
I hate this language.

I can now appreciate some design decisions behind react-redux after witnessing some angular OOP clusterfuck.

I am sure there is some clean/correct way to code in angular, but everyone is treating angular as java.

Some angular application (the one I have to work with) is littered with network calls. It's difficult to spot duplicates. People usually resolve promises everywhere. In services, in a top-level component, or in for loops. In react, people use apollo/redux-query or redux-saga to handle network calls. Since these libraries prevent duplicate network calls internally and reassigning apollo network call function or redux action function is always useless, it's easy to spot all network calls in a component tree.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data mutations when data can be updated everywhere. In react, you can easily find UI state updates by tracing state hooks/dispatch/apollo usages.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data pipeline. Since everything is imperative by default, people need to add update functions in data subscriptions. With all the littered mutations. Soon you will lose track of what the fuck is going on.

I hope angular get the agonizing death it deserves and fuck everyone who codes JS OOP clusterfuck UI.

Met a girl in an app. She is hot 10/10. Sense of humor is 10/10. Empathy, integrity is 3/10. I’ve realized she is an addict of Marijuana. We’ve been talking for a month and she’s stood me up once. Then went traveling. Says she misses me. Then goes cold. And back and forth. This shit is a fucking headache. Just today she was stoned and telling me its not gonna work, I want kids and marriage and she can’t give me that. She sends me nudes and promises we will meet at the end of the month. This entire fucking thing is an emotional rollercoaster. I don’t feel the same at work. My productivity is suffering. My gut says to block her. And I fucking hate the thought of it but it’s right for my peace of mind and productivity. I just wonder how long I should fight since we have such fun conversations. I’ve lots all trust for her. She’s basically like a permanent fixture of my digital life it seems. And that’s depressing as hell. I’m giving her two weeks to show in my physical life otherwise I’ve set a date in my calendar where I must block. Addiction doesn’t even cut it, I feel addicted to this person. The jokes the laughter, the beauty. It’s torture.

I've been working with Node and Typescript for a while now, and I wrote a wide array of very general utility functions. Examples include:
- Array.filter but you also get the residue array, it can also leave holes in both arrays if you want to join them later
- Array zipping and unzipping to and from tuples (especially valuable when you're manipulating the prop set with Object.entries() in a HOC
- Array maximum selection, with an optional mapper
- Cancelable promises, lazy promises, a promise that resolves when a given function on an object is called (excellent for DOM events), a timeout promise.
- A typed event with both immediate and microtask listeners depending on whether you need state guarantees (this idea I took from a Github gist and upgraded it)

I want to put them on NPM so I don't have to write them and their tests again, and so that if I ever think of an improvement it's easier to propagate it. Do you think I should release them as tiny individual packages which would be nice from a versioning standpoint, or should I make them into a compilation which would be a lot less work for me (and therefore would probably result in better documentation and more tests)?

I'd like to hear from developers which prefers Angular to React the reason of said preference.
I want to hear that becasue I like React way more than Angular since I find which is easier to learn (making a form with a React hook is easy while it takes days just to get a grip on Angular forms), it usually takes less code to do things, it doesn't force libraries which may not be necessary for your use case and just makes your bundle bigger (for example most things which are done in NgRx can be done just as easily with regular JS promises without the need of an external tool) and I generally prefer functional programming to OOP.
Said that I want to hear the other side, not to argue but because I want to know cases in which Angular may be a better choice than React to become a better rounded dev.

There's a special place in hell for JS people using `.then()` and `.catch()` instead of simply `await func()`.
Why have 5 lines of code with an await, when instead you can have 5 nested `.then` callbacks.

And yes I know there are some cases where async/await isn't applicable, but that's rather rare

So...I think I have a job now sort of...just signed my first big long-term gig as a consultant/dev for an US based startup, pay promises to be solid, the CEO seems to be shill and they'll pay me for hours worked with a relatively low minimum which is great because that freedom will allow me to continue my projects and dumb college assignments.

Let's hope neither of the two parties fuck it up.

Anyone ever stay on a set of projects they knew were going to fail? I got pulled off of 3 major projects to help another team that was failing at their very high visibility project. I got that back on track, but then they needed to keep me on for stabilization work and to onboard some folks. Then they still kept me on and my projects all suffered. I was very vocal to management about my concerns. Finally, management recognized that my projects weren’t getting done so now I’m back on them. The thing is, now it’s probably too late and I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail to meet deadlines on all three (plus there’s scope creep of course). I want to just walk away from this hell hole, but I’ve made some promises to folks that helped me get the job that I wouldn’t be a job hopper (been here 4 years, and each year is worse than the last). I think I’m just going to do the best I can and see what happens - and try not to have a heart attack in the process.

var me = q.defer()
//bug: these don't seem to resolve to anything, why do we do this?
meeting
.start()
.then(dumb_requirements => boss.accumulate(q.all(dumb_requirements))
.then(me.reject)
.catch(boss.getMad)

return me.promise

Typescript is my new favorite and my grudge is the stupid scoping of type assertions. I have an async function that checks whether a variable is set and awaits a change event if it's undefined. This function is working javascript but invalid according to typescript, because it relies on the exact type changing while the function is running. I had to convert it to a mess of promises to bypass this because (and this is the best) the callback-based syntax of identical meaning will reset all type assertions, even locals that are never written after the callback's creation.

For a side project I identified the need for RPC (originally over Websocket but can be extended to WebRTC/DTLS) that supports

- JSON-serializable values
- Promises
- MessagePorts (including shortcut detection for ports that are passed back on a different route)
- async functions

I have ideas for all of these and this is an exciting prospective library, but it's also major scope bloat that will prevent me from ever finishing the project that depends on it.

Would you be interested in such a library if it ever got built?

SO, after finishing uni I joined a startup.

"We'll cover devops stuff! Aws certifications for everyone! And later k8s!"

So I'm here, learning VueJS.

(Tbf, the situation is better than it seems, like being here, boss is a honest person. Still, fuck.)

What's the minimal feature set that can make a language as ornamented as JS into a comfortable REPL?
Should I write a full parser or should I try to patch my way around with regex?
It will have to interface a lot with JS so it has to be able to manage JS datastructures in some fashion, which means that I can't just make a whole new command line with its own programs.

My current plan:
Some delimiter (probably a semicolon) will take the output of a command and inject it in the next in case you decide halfway through a line to do some more processing, It also awaits promises and does some other nice stuff to make controlling such pipelines easy. I have an elaborate system in mind to decide where a value must be injected to make the line valid so in most cases you don't even have to indicate it. JS has beautifully simple syntax rules so I have a lot of technical balance to burn before I start building technical debt.

I have some ideas for automatic parentheses and commas in function calls. I realize while using a command line you do not want to tap shift often. My main idea here is that two names or values in js are always joined by an operator so the first missing operator is a call and following missing operators are commas until the end of line. This has lots of nasty edge cases though, like that no argument expression can begin with a unary operator or a bracket of any shape. You can always prepend a comma but it's cognitive load.

Anyway, do you have any suggestion or warning besides "js bad" which I know but it's the most popular sandboxable language and has a massive existing set of libraries which I kinda need.