Prototype devRant rubber duck. Depending on my craft skills, might have a variety of dev themed capes too

One company i applied for never wanted to give me the job because they where building a prototype and they wanted someone familiar with their stack to get things up in a short time span.

*Fast forward 7 months*

The company i work currently with has been developing prototypes for startups to help validate their ideas and guess what, the bunch above came to our company unknowing that i work here and i have been put on the project as a lead.

Lol man, you cant write this stuff

Worst Hackathon ? When you have coded so hard during 48 hours to have a functional prototype and the winners get trophee with a static PowerPoint, full of bullshit buzzwords...

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

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

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

Music to my ears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Algo!

!rant
Saw many people share their setups, so here's mine right now.

Before you're hired:
1. A binary tree?
2. Currying?
3. Higher-order function?
4. How does event loop work?
5. What is prototype?
6. What is encapsulation?
7. Can you draw an algorithm?

After you're hired:
1. Hey, can you add auth token and login to our app?

Pm: Can you make a prototype in 3 weeks?

Me: Sure, but just for the sake of demoing something to the customer. It will take more time for production ready code.

(3 weeks later)

PM (to customer): We can sign you up today and you can use it tomorrow.

Me: 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Developed an android app for the client. It was going great. Prototype for the initial (and static) content to show to the client was on the way. All until...

*goes back in time to when we were developing the prototype*

The asshole boss: "Wow this is good, just remove the login after the splash screen. Redirect it to the dashboard immediately."

Me: "What? Why?"

TAB: "He (the CEO of our company) said that the client doesn't need to see the login."

Me: "Well, alright." (Orders are orders, better remove it)

*A few days later, we present the prototype to the CEO. He'll be the one talking to the client. TAB isn't in this meeting.*

CEO: "Where is the login screen?"

Me: *dumbfounded and confused, in silence, and pressure rising*

The Good Boss: *whispers* "Where is the login screen? I thought I told you guys it should be there."

Me: *whispers* "TAB told us to remove it."

TGB: *Looks toward CEO* "TAB told us to remove it."

CEO: "Ugh. TAB is sick."

A little giggle. Nonetheless the meeting continued. He was displeased. I was a little guilty. The login screen's code was already there. Just couldn't show it since the app doesn't redirect there anymore.

*A discussion after the meeting*

TGB: "Why'd you guys remove the login?"

Me: "You and TAB had a meeting with the CEO the other day. After the discussion TAB went to us and told us to change it."

TGB: "But the CEO said no such thing! Anyway, let's go back to the office and straighten this out tomorrow."

*The next day, TAB was in the office*

TGB: *Chatting on messenger with me* "He is completely denying it."

Me: "WHAT?"

TGB: "He said he never told you guys anything. And he is persistent. I kept telling him it was his fault, but he denies all of it. He never approached you guys to change anything."

Me: "Well yeah. I guess we magically thought to ourselves and said, 'Hey, let's remove the login screen for fun. Let's show them less content because that's how we please our clients!' -_-"

Seriously, what kind of assholefuckery is this. This shit is a whole new level. I am so TRIGGERED.

I don't really care that the meeting didn't go as planned. Just MAN UP AND ADMIT YOUR MISTAKE YOU FILTHY SON OF A GOOSE. Never listening to this asshole again. Thought he could be trusted. I will always ask my good boss next time.

When you show people a working prototype of what they asked for and they immediately start point out flaws.

IT'S A FUCKING PROTOTYPE, DIPSHIT!

!rant
Because dual monitor setups are too mainstream... here's my dual mouse setup.

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

TL;DR
Deadline means shit for management and they can't fucking understand wtf a prototype is for.

Hahahahaha so we are gonna present this prototype tomorrow ( 2018-03-08 ) at a meeting with investors and our management practically demanded a landing page to be at this presentation.

The landing page is gonna be made by a 3rd party, they asked for directions on the content about the landing page with a deadline set for Friday ( 2018-03-02 ) .

Management sent an email yesterday with the following content:
- Changes on the prototype ( A LOT OF CHANGES )
- The landing page content: a fucked up confusing as fuck word document with crossed over text, red text. A lot of noise that meas nothing and only makes the reader confused as fuck

Why am I laughing you may ask?
Our front ender took the prototyping role out of my hands and the landing page is a third party responsibility.

None of this is my work, I'm here watching the world burn for the first time and boy its funny and warm.

:)

Yesterday: Dear Diary, today the client changed their mind on a critical part of the project.

Today: Dear Diary, (see yesterday).

So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.

Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.

I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:

$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"

$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."

$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"

$me: "What...What new thruster?"

$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"

WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!

Participated in an IEEE Hackathon where we built a line following robot. We were the slowest, but we had the most accuracy.

The image is our first attempt at getting it to work, consequently, we were the first team to actually get a prototype finished and working. Other people were trying to cram as many sensors as possible. We stuck with one, and 47 lines of code to make it work. Everyone else had more than 2 sensors and I can only imagine how much code they had.

So the company I work for decides there's money for installing a Jacuzzi on the roof but won't buy our new dev a PC? Where's he supposed to work? In the fecking hot tub?

This is the prototype of my "Build Button". I press the button and it executes a build process. Keyboard shortcuts weren't good enough for me.

You know that feeling when you got revolutionary idea and you search it if it exists.
It doesnt yayyyyyyyy.
So you say nobody about it and start working on it.
After few days.
You search it again and somebody already done a prototype.
Okay let the WAR begin.

When you see what is clearly a hacked together prototype running as production code.

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

After 10 months of development we bring the first prototype of our awesome new product to show it to the board of directors. Whereupon the chairman of the board angrily shouts at us "has nobody told you we cancelled this project a month ago?!"

I left two months later, they went bankrupt a year later.

User: I can't access the system, it keeps asking me to change my password!
Me: ....
Me: Tried changing your password?
User: Not yet

How to be a Dev:

Step 1: have a great idea
Step 2: start work on great idea
Step 3: read a blog about someone who also has a great idea and finishes it quicker than you prototype it
Step 4: check back daily and see them gloat about how much money, fame and shit they got from said idea
Step 4: rant about it on Dev rant to vent anger

I made a web app that utilizes the GeoLocation API, that is used by search and rescue services in a couple of countries, to located missing and/or injured people “in the wild”. Over a few years, hundreds of people has been found due to this tool, some of them would probably not have survived without it! Made the first prototype myself, then two other devs joined in.

Open source and SaaS is offered free of charge to the rescue services. :)

Showing prototype to client

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

Seeing someone prototype a 3D game with complex lighting using OpenGL in a 15 minute video (It was sped up about 4x but, still, fuck me)

Using c. Not c++.

He also did 3D graphics in BASIC from scratch to explain how they work, generally.

I joined based on a friend invitation, then he didn’t attend...
It was two days hackathon...
Spent the first day trying to find any thing to do... but didn’t!
Slept in the place chatting and socializing...
In the second day, I found interesting JavaScript library, and decided to invest my time trying it...
Built a prototype in two hours, photoshop a presentation in two hours... waited 3 hours to the end of the event... present my Working POC...
Won second place and qualified to the world wide competition!

Hey guys :(
The rant will be long.

Today was one of the worst day ever.
I'm feeling so shitty right now.

I'm 19 and I started my apprenticeship about a half year ago on a very small company.
From day one I had many things to do, every day is hard and a new experience. But I'm learning a lot.

Two months ago I had my very first presentation for a client. I was really excited and nervous but everything was fine and the client as well as my boss were proud of me.

Today I should present again a prototype for the same client. But this time not directly personal, instead we did it via TeamViewer. After the client finally found out, how to open and start this shit, the disaster tooked its course.
After explaining him the conzept, I wanted to show him in the software. For some reason it suddenly stopped working. I've just made a change recently which leads in all appeareances to an error .
Because of that error I couldn't proceed, so I have to explain and show him the data I created before I made the changes.
With that everything Just worked fine, I could explain and visualize everything. It didn't Matter and didn't changed anything, only the Name was a Name from me.
The client was very relaxed about this error. He said that it is a prototype , it is not serious.
Furthermore I showed and demonstrated him everything.
But my boss wasn't very surprised and Happy about me. He made me responsable for the error, I should have prepared everything better and this all was Shit.
This made me really,really sad. It sounded so hard.
I know that I've made a mistake, but it's human. I'm only 19. I'm not perfect. Sure, I could have prevented it, if I had tested all possibilites right after I had made the changes again. I prepared the whole presentation on the weekend, on my personal freetime. I spent so often so much time in my freetime just for my job, for my apprenticeship. To get what? A fat bite, a kick in the ass. I'm doing so much, but this is not acknowledged. But when I make something wrong - then I'm the shittiest person.

Damn. Don't know how to handle this situation. This has gone to far today.
Yeah, I could have tested More, but I only tested the existing Data. I prepared the presentation very Well. This is so sad.

I remember my first software engineer internship, the boss was terrible. He was cheap and only hired interns we had 0 guidance. This mother fucker would say shit in meetings like "hey we should start providing DBAAS, similar to DynamoDB start researching it I want a prototype by Wednesday" Wtf this guy is nuts. The overall product was suppose to be a fucking virtual machine hosting platform to compete with AWS, Digital Ocean, RackSpace etc designed by BS computer science interns lol. This guy tells us in a meeting one day "You know what's the difference between those guys (the competitors) and us?" We all looked around lost. This pompous ass hole says "Me , that's the difference you guys have me " 😂 what a fucking joke , not to mention all he has is a shitty math degree from a bullshit no name college in India, no developing experience what so ever. Man o man I never met anyone that was so fucking stupid but thought they were so fucking smart

This morning I saw the announcement about new avatars... but I was a bit disappointed because I feel it was missing something... something that I have recently requested a few times....

So I've taken the initiative to create a prototype what I would like.

Anyone else want this?

I think one difficult thing about being a developer is having all your business friends tell you they have this idea that would make millions but you have to build a prototype (for free) for them to pitch. They don't seem to understand that this is a full time job.

+++ Thank you for 1000+'s! +++

So guys we did it! We've reached our first big milestone!
This account was created about a month ago, and we are already this far!

Thanks to all authors (@DLMousey, @filthyranter, @baewulff) who are putting a lot of work and time into their articles and help this account to further grow in size!

To make this article at least a bit informative, here's how we publish our posts:
When I started this account, I hadn't thought of how articles were going to be published. Should I give the password to all writers? Should I post the articles manually?
Well, after I've started the devNews Discord Server, @olback suggested making a Discord Bot, that helps us to publish our stuff.
After surprisingly few hours, @olback already got a prototype working.
We have a special channel and whoever writes stuff in it, updates the current article. Later, I took on the work, @olback has done and switched to LowDB, to be able to let multiple users have their own articles they are working on and much more. (Like special signatures)
And that's how it is now.
We have a channel for draft, where we write our stuff and a channel for publishing, where the bot listens to what we write and then publishes the articles with a command.
That's all of it.

Thank you for reading!

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

VueJS FTW!

Today I realised I've been a fucking idiot.
For the last few years I have familiarized myself with libraries like React, VueJS, Preact etc.

All while playing around on my own side projects but when it came to doing actual work (perhaps from a lack of confidence/working experience with them) I always reverted to vanilla js or jQuery because I convinced myself it wasn't the `right` use case or `the project was too simple or small`.

I WAS AN IDIOT.

The below screenshot is a prototype of a n invoicing tool I needed to write which uses VueJS and is implemented in 50 beautiful, clean, maintainable loc. Combined with TypeScript it is a dream - never did I think I would see the day where I could grab an inputs numerical value without prepending the variable with + so I don't end up concatenating them as strings.

If your like me and haven't started using some kind of data binding view framework stop procrastinating and just do it. I feel like I wasted a large chunk of my life clinging onto my old ways.

One Man's Prototype is Another Manager's Product

Shit, I need to prototype a layout real quick...

*Opens MS Paint*

3 people for developing the prototype including me.

One person knows unity. He started modeling the terrain in that.

Another person knows 3D modelling. He started designing the bots.

I don't know unity or C#. I started implementing the logic :/

It was the worst experience but learned shitloads from it in 2 days.

Think of an idea that can really benefit others.
Start working on the project and come up with a working prototype.
Complete the project 98%
Get bored of the project.
Move on to another project.

Boss: Can you modify the prototype, so that I can show it off to the customers who will visit?
Me: Sure, when do you need it?
Boss: In two hours.
Lesson learned: Always have a branch in your git with a working demo.

My first Dev job involved password resets. Quickly created a GUI for that shit and passed it off to IT support.

I used to think Electron apps were gonna do great and make it more accessible for companies to produce high quality programs with ease.

Oh boy I was wrong. All it did is enable big companies with the ability to refactor all of their software to run 5 times slower, consume 10 times more memory and kill your battery 20 times faster.

I fucking hate all of this prototype fast optimize later bullshit. Can I get some value for my dollar? How come technology is just being degraded for the same of "ease of programming".

You save programming time but sacrifice end user time, cus our time just doesn't fucking matter.

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

The best part of dev life is when I create a prototype and the client immedietly says: "Excellent!"

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

!rant
Just finished my CNC.
Lots of problems but it works... More or less.
Need better steppers and other drivers. But I did it, learned a lot, did lots of mistakes, and don't get me started on debugging hardware...
Z axis unfortunaly can't even pull the motor up lol.

Client: "We want you to build us a quick prototype / proof of concept. Don't make it too neat, we'll rebuild it before we go live."
Also client: "We already have a working version, why would we rebuild it?"

Finnaly....
Look who's back.
CNC Machine V3.0

Hired three months ago.

Trying to implement a feature the heads were long waiting to have. It involves a part of codebase so messy and complex that even senior devs were afraid to touch.

Made a prototype, finalized related stuff, merged to develop. Got praises at the demo meeting.

Feeling like Frodo after his quest 😳

Sometimes I feel really bad becouse i am incapable of coding faster.
I saw someone coding a prototype of pong in 5 minutes.
It took me 30 minutes just to make the constructor function of the paddles

Programming Languages are Like Cars:

Assembler: A formula I race car. Very fast but difficult to drive and maintain.

FORTRAN II: A Model T Ford. Once it was the king of the road.

FORTRAN IV: A Model A Ford.

FORTRAN 77: a six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.

COBOL: A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.

BASIC: A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch it as soon as you can afford a new one.

PL/I: A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield.

C++: A black Firebird, the all macho car. Comes with optional seatbelt (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).

ALGOL 60: An Austin Mini. Boy that's a small car.

ALGOL 68: An Aston Martin. An impressive car but not just anyone can drive it.

Pascal: A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectual types.

liSP: An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.

PROLOG/LUCID: Prototype concept cars.

FORTH: A go-cart.

LOGO: A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.

APL: A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.

Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle.

Some absolute cock-monkey fuck-nugget of a marketing director asked me the other week if I could implement a discount voucher system into a new side project / prototype we’re building.

I said ‘yeah sure but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, i’ll have a look’

He said ‘you just let someone enter a code and that takes £10 off the total order value’

REALLY?!

IS THAT HOW IT WORKS?!!

THANKS FOR EXPLAINING THAT TO ME YOU FUCKING ASS-CUNT. BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW HOW A FUCKING DISCOUNT VOUCHER WORKED, YOU ABSOLUTE MOUTH BREATHING WASTE OF FUCKING ORGANS.

I’LL JUST GO TYPE THAT INTO MICROSOFT WORD AND SAVE THE FILE TO THE MAGICAL CLOUD SHALL I?

“dear computer, take a voucher code from a user and take £10 off of there order value”

THERE YOU GO YOU PRICK; JOB DONE. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IS EASY, EH?!

Wank.

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

I'd been constantly working on another prototype for the past 63 hours straight without sleeping and this was the best thing I could've asked for to make my day.

Thanks @dfox and @trogus for the lovely stickers!

Build a prototype of an app that helps doctors monitor their patients and lets patients learn more about their conditions.

Sold it to 2 healthcare clinics!

Yesterday I completed a transactions module that used an external payment processor, similar to PayPal. It was hard, but after few hours of trying out different options I finally managed to get it to work.

I decided to create a simple prototype UI without any styling just to show my progress to the manager and let him know that it's working.

His response? "yeah, that seems to work, but that UI is terrible and not appealing at all. Change that immediately and try to add more thought into your design"

I guess I won't be making prototypes any time soon

When 3/4 of my team gave up and left halfway through. I still don't understand how we ended up with a working prototype in the end.

We all have that one prototype/test app in our phone

So there's this developer I work with. Let's call him Kevin.

I am a UX designer, former Developer from IBM - but I really love design, so I made the switch. My background however, usually makes working with Developers easy.

But not this guy! I provided a clickable prototype complete with code to easily inspect with Dev tools for measurements. I provided mobile references for some screens but not all.

Kevin submits screenshots for me to review the design. Looks nothing like the prototype, so I get out my Wacom tablet and basically draw redlines over the screenshot. "No border here, 22px should be 20px, etc."

His response was:

"I need you to say exactly what you one (want?) each pages and mobile pages to look like, text size of the font, etc.

You did a lot of red marking, so I am asking for clarification."

So basically asking for red line specs. I asked a month ago if he wanted all the mobile screens, or if what I provided was enough along with the style guide. He agreed. So now I'm majorly pissed off.

Maybe it's also the fact that one of the other developers has to hold his hand, because everything he does is bad. 😡 And his lack of ability to articulate a damn sentence effectively drives me crazy. Cherry on top, I suppose.

Would love to bring this up with my boss. ♥️ And suggestions. 😍

Friend of mine: so I wonder how do you test your applications in the startup?

Me: testing? *grabs his coffee laughing*

Actually we have a complete build pipeline from commit/pull-request to dev and production environments. No tests. Really. We are in rapid product development / research state.

We change technologies and approaches like our underwear (and yeah, this is frequently). If we settled some day and understood the basic problems of the whole feature palette, we'll talk about tests again.

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

My magnetic wall-type wireless charger prototype failed again and it's the second fuse I've blown this week. Fourth in my entire life.

House is dark again. Father is angry because he's on a PC and he got cut off from the anime he's watching, and the siblings are now laughing at my hopeless wireless electricity project. 😂😂😂 My cat is now internally judging me with her squint, too.

Alright, alright, I'll get a USB wall plug now and try hooking up the magnetic charger into it. USB power cables are more or less the same thing, right? 😂😂😂

I mean come on, Apple's magnetic charger comes with a USB power cable on one end. Should be a no brainer...

Why did God afflict me with a disordered attachment towards tinkering with stuff?

1) Built an entire SoC around a MIPS CPU. Fixed bugs in the CPU. Created hardware, busses, firmware, wrote Linux drivers, ported Linux.

2) Still working on a C++ abstraction framework for heterogenous computations for 4 years. About to solve / create a prototype for GPGPU and maybe even HDL code generation. Utilizes dynamic dispatch for scalar, SSE, AVX and other targets. I started this only because I did not like the performance of procedural noise algorithms utilized in a game prototype I started in 2015.

3) Created a game in 5 months to drag myself out of depression. Feeling success while your job sucks is soooo goooodd...

Had an idea for an app. I started writing the prototype in Node since I just had a simple API in mind. Wanted to have some very basoc crud functionality going and then hook up a nice interface to it. It has to do with logistics and analytics so I just wanted to start sketching something small, and being that i have been successful in doing an API like this in the pass with node and mongo for a local company I said why not.

I have finished a good chunk of it. Gotta love that js productivity. But what tripped me out about it was:

Check how big the folder size is: 387mb

EXCUSE ME??!!

I tripped, there was no way in hell this shit was that heavy. I am basically using Koi(to give it a whirl instead of express, gotta start testing koi sometimes right?) And some joi with morgan and winston. That is it. I am using mongo since legit its the only one i know, even with that there really can't be that much right?

Check node_modules size.....10mb....wtf? What
Wait
Did it?

Sure as shit....forgot that i was storing the mongo data folder inside the app's root folder.

This would have been nothing if it would have taken me 30 seconds to figure it out.

I was losing my mind for 30 mins before i decided to properly verify

I need some sleep

Make a prototype, no where near ready for customer and sales team sells it!
😢

Interviewing a potential candidate...

Me: So, how would you rate your JavaScript knowledge?

Him: Pretty good, although I still don't really understand prototypal inheritance.

Me: Yeah, it's hard to understand something which doesn't exist.

...let the flaming begin 😈

I’m saving money to buy sketch, but guess what...

Adobe XD is free now 👌🏼

To her friend: "I downloaded myself a lot more RAM last night, my laptop is so much faster!"
...
No, person on the bus, you did not download extra RAM. Sorry.

My girlfriend dumped me coz I named a js prototype on her, she said I treated her as classless.

Well two days ago, i was in a sap codin g camp (ranted about that)
The challenge: moke a robot that avoid collisions and 6inds a black mm spot on tha floor
We marginally had enough time te implement sth but well i tried to do an algo.
10 mins before deadline i realized that it wouldnt work. So i took an old prototype (without algo) from the trash bin, fixed compilation errors and went to the competition without testing. Because we had to do a little explanation for the parents about arduinos, we all were shaky. A friend of mine even failed to remember his text xD

Asso, because of Fortuna wanting to beat us down, we were the last team driving in the arena. Everybody got pretty fast times. (with a random algo). At the end, we took our robot with the untestet thrash bin program.
It drove pretty well, avoided collisions and then it happened: it reached (only robot not to collide) the black spot in 1:09!!! 😁

Client: "Let's code a prototype to show our intents to the customer. We have 96 screens to implement as a native app in 6 weeks"
~Prototype delivered in 6 weeks, despite some changes in the design on-the-go. Few months later~
Client: "The customer likes the prototype a lot. They would like to see some changes (another set of > 40 screens). It's still a prototype and the changes should be implemented in a month, but this time it has to use real data from external apis. We don't know which APIs yet, but it should also go live on the app store"

Like, seriously?

My new toy. RC prototype :-D

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

That time you think you found your dream dev job...

But they really just needed a content entry person so the other dev could add 'senior' to his title and work on all the new fun projects, while you're stuck fixing IE7 bugs in his code from 3 years ago.

He used prototype instead of jQuery.

You try to tell them about responsive design, but they think everything needs a separate mobile version.

You spend half the day learning his custom functions to a cms he built 2 years ago, and he's in the process of rebuilding a new cms from the ground up, so you have to learn the new version too.

Was fired 3 days before my birthday, and didn't get my company gift, even though I contributed to every one else's gifts.

Fired 2 months before birth of my child so lost my insurance.

After my time there... They now build responsive, they now use jQuery for everything. I also showed them how to do IE testing with virtual box, instead of them using the secretary's computer.

(Joke || Rant)

This guy came with this joke.
Ok, funny.
Then months later you realise he pushed this tweaked prototype to master, and now this code is shipped in production and it actually prints some idiotic sentence about flat earth on console output.
Ok, idiot.

It's not my project, but sometimes I'm wondering what people have in their minds when using version control and ship crap...

"Disregard what you're doing now. We need a FUNCTIONAL prototype (which will become the main app because refactoring is a waste of time huehuehuehue) with these features our POSSIBLE client MIGHT potentially need for TOMORROW's presentation."

"What do you mean that thing you were working on yesterday isn't done? Those are the times we estimated, right? By the way, our (still not confirmed) client thinks he'll choose us over that other company if we do changes A, B, C and D. Need it for yesterday."

I missed a week of school while I was sick, and in that week my teammates made a deal with the client to have a prototype for him in 3 weeks, AFTER asking me (teamleader) how long it would take (4 weeks min.). Why don't they FUCKING listen to their teamleader!! They're gonna have a bad time in the future...

And now I have to spend my whole night writing a prototype because THEY told a wrong estimate...

Alright so I have to create an API that communicates with a web interface and three different back end systems. And I think my customer might have thought that I am actually Jesus because they didn't have any docs for their systems and their policy did not allow me to gain access to their internal testing environment (which. Drove. Me. NUTS) and expected me to create this API by pure guesswork basically. After teaching the customer's internal IT guy how to capture requests between the systems I managed to somehow got the prototype working. I am proud and sleepy. ... Mainly sleepy

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

Fucking great.

A fucking nightmare for one month to present a near-finished functioning web-app instead of a prototype.

Web-app presented in a prototipe-ish manner because it was actually being FUCKING TESTED WITH INVESTORS?!??!!??!
OMFG IM SOOOOO PISSED IM JUST GONNA ASK FOR VACATION AND DISAPEAR
WTF

ARRGH!!
That moment when your laptop crashes just before you save the changes to that working prototype... lost for ever.

We had a course where we, the students, got connected with companies who could pitch ideas for us to choose. So we were to develop something for a company for free, but that probably won't be so bad, right? When the course was over we told the company we would fix any critical bugs that appeared after the final prototype was developed. We only had 8 weeks to complete the project, and that includes documentation (project plan etc) and other "school stuff" like an essay on what we've learned and so on. In other words, didn't have enough time to develop what the company was really looking for. Still those guys is bugging us about minor bugs they want fixed or "could you just implement this feature" . The course is over, they have all the source code so they could hire someone else to do it (or us, you could pay us you know?) but nooooo they think we owe it to them. We gave them a fully functional application to use, free of charge, but that still isn't enough. And they threaten with "but you can use this in a future resume" (yea we had to sign a NDA). Fuck it, am I being a whiny bitch?

Makes a joke about my work laptop im getting that we should all invest in some game development so we need some new laptops (we develop prototype apps to validate ideas for startups and i never work on proper projects). I get to work and see this.. Omw im so happy..

Scrum. And agile. And people over-communicating. And estimating work complexity on a prototype. And people in general. I like nights, when all annoying people just shut the fuck up and sleep.

! Rant
Today's project...
Target for airsoft.
The prototype bullseye didn't survive the trials but it works. Just need to upgrade to wood.

After getting stuck in the shower this morning; I am starting a petition to get shampoo manufacturers to wrap their instructions in a do-while loop. Telling a developer to "lather, rinse, repeat" is a recipe for disaster...

Instead of spending time to configure the billions of things for React, I have decided to start my new project with the good ol’ Jquery. Some might disagree, but I want to get a working prototype first.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Fuck. The entire day to do this shit.
The screen was my first experiment, but because of a bad module (i2c) it didn't worked.
Today I finnaly got it to work.
Starting making everything almost like in the picture, everything mounted (and lots of black hot glue, no wires showing...
Didn't work.
One hour breaking everything apart without damaging the screen... Was a loose wire.
Started again... Didn't work...
The pot is also damaged, sometimes it works, others need to turn it hard.
New pot.
New set of wires.
Soldering everything right, testing all wires so no mistakes this time... But it takes so longgggg... Making everything in modules this time (to reuse without having to sordering again. And finally... It works.
By this time I should have 3 or 4 learning projects finish (I really wanted the screen to adapt all output in text, no serial, no blinking less, everything in modules, code prepared so, when I get my 40+ packages from China I already have a prototype tester ready.
10 hours... Fuck I'm really addicted, or else I would just solder everything together :D

11 hours. I helped my girlfriend with an app prototype she planned :)

Lels

Before I was unceremoniously laid off by a shit company in which they tried to blame shit on me I was working on a opencv implementation of a proprietary document scanner.

I finished the Android prototype and was working on the ios implementation. It was left unfinished in the ios version because I was building it in swift and obj c to compare code bases.

They launched a shit unfinished Android app of their product without the scanner (they could not add the scanner lels) and have not been able to do shit on the ios version.

I did not give them the Android prototype. There was no binding contract that specified that what I developed was theirs. There is no record of anything.

The scanner? Is still in my phone and I still have the built project in my mac.
Unless them cheap assholes decide to pay another engineer for the opencv implementation, their vbscript php non theory knowing shit lead will have to figure out the required mat obj c swift java cpp code needed to build it.

Top kek

On a scale of 1-10, how lazy are you when it comes to prototype code?

Me, well I'm a 'fuck it lets just wildcard anything that is a child of a GLib objects'

Don't be like me kids...

EDIT: Yes i know it should have been an override void

We founded a 3 man startup.
I am on holiday for two weeks and my mates paid 50k to someone so he programs a prototype app without any specifications. They told him about what the app should display without any mockups or images via Skype. Returned Monday, found out about it, and on the following Monday we will see the current status..
Oh boy, dog help me. I expect a clickdummy made with Adobesomething, and we paid 50k for that. Why didn't they wait for 2 weeks?!

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

made a prototype and showed the demo to clients. They asked me where it was stored and how to access to the code. Told them where it was stored was was a trial and it has expired. Asked me why I didn't pay the subscription. Also asked me if I could send them the code, for them to "try using it" and "implement it in their office". Told them if they wanted to use the program, it needs to be done again (since this is a prototype). 3 days now, no sounds from the client.

Making my own metro style watches with 7 segment 4 digit display and well arduino and i have created my own time in it without delay function and damn i was thinking it would have lot of bugs as last version had like it was 1 second ahead of real time every time hour++ and now its fixed somehow.
Its pretty cool and will post photo of it once its done.
Also did you fucking now that analog pins can be used to digitalWrite ? I didnt. That makes a lot of fucking things easier.
Also yeah it also have that blue light when you are in some light.

"Don't worry we only need the prototype"

'Hey I found a bug in your code, it's probably a typo, see here.'

Me: Oh right, yeah. How stupid of me. Thanks, I'll push it.

'It's okay. You can push it or I can do it too after you push the changes we just discussed. I actually simplified one of your methods.'

Me: You, what... ?
(You crammed multiple lines in a single line with your stupid as fuck, rigid constructs, removing my error handling, loosely coupled service, in the name of simplification?)

' Yeah it's just four lines in a single function now, no need to call the function again and again.'

Me: (No... Just no. This totally undos whatever little I could do to avoid supporting your idiotic object in the first place.)
Oh... okay, we'll see. I'll let you know.

What life.
Life in a company full of ignorant, inflated egos is no joke.

Details:
I created a service that reads a configuration file and returns the configuration. This person needs five entries for his app logic. He collected them in a object. Quite alright. Except that the class prototype is shitty. I, like a normal person, made my service return a value based on input. I was asked to incorporate this awful object so that I can return the five entries together, which is awful because the service is not supposed to know about how the entries are clubbed. It should most certainly not know about the data members of the object!

Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code

Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.

History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.

Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.

New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.

But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....

Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"

And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed.

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...

I gave my project manager a prototype of the ocr app we're developing to play with, just for fun. The next morning, I enter the office to see this along with a well structure spreadsheet with some 40 columns.

Never underestimate the seriousness of a project manager.

Spend months on a project, multiple rewrites and constant refactoring of code.

Three different repos, multiple branches each, all being maintained as best as I can.

A few days ago I dropped all the npm dependancies I could with no lost functionality, and megabytes of packages pruned.

Finally think it's in alpha stage, so I put it out there to promote (alpha as in not just a poorly written prototype, an actual working piece), and it's totally ignored. Went the extra mile to make it extra open source and other good things. Nothing.

What should I do? The license is GPL, should I switch to BSD? How can I promote this software, because I believe it could do great things (it's for science)

Einstein supposedly has a quote attributed to him: "Perfection isn't achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."

I find that I aggressively refactor code where I can to only what is absolutely required. It does also have the knock on effect of reducing scope of bugs, when the code is smaller there's only so many places bugs can be.

Tesla claimed to have the ability to create designs in his head and only built things once he was satisfied that it worked in theory first, now it's rare I can do that, but I will use a repl to prototype or test modules in isolation before just hacking on the actual code.

Jobs, I mean, I know he didn't code but he was always insisting on designs that looked good and was generally uncompromising in his design centric view.

My friend, she was my Starbucks barista for a while but I've slowly been teaching her code and she's taught me a lot about how to teach others to code, she also happens to be my favourite student.

// Define this isn't a rant.
this.isRant = false;

So just curious if there are any dev stroke artists on here that might be willing to lend me a hand with some prototype art...

Just need some character sprites made into modular pieces and a few edits.

Didn't know anywhere else to post this :-(

That moment when you make a suggestion. But client ignores you, and you end up building what they want.

Then an asshole comes along and presents the thing that you suggested, and has the balls to say they made it. When you can clearly see that it's the prototype you made!

At least it's Friday...

When I am asked to do something and the next day same person asks to change what was changed the day before.
For fuck sake do a prototype and fucking change that and not the actual fucking code 😒😒😒

Weee both projects from yesterday went perfect...
Usual most of my projects end up fucked up because I want to do stuff I don't know how to... (well, I'm learning so I don't get frustrated, just pick up another idea).
Air cooler for power people V 1.1 works perfect. Today we will get almost 40 C and I feel the cold air in my face.

Lately I've noticed a lot of people complaining about webview apps (electron and so on)... While I see their arguments for resource hungry apps, slow and unreliable - I strongly think that it's just complaining for no reason....

It's slow - yes
It's stupid to make web work in native - yes
But guys, isn't it awesome that technologies allows us to do such things? Even a simple web developer can quickly prototype an application on mac/windows/linux/android/iphones - even if it's not a great one, you still don't need to learn all the corks and quacks of the languages... You just need to get it out there!

So, I'd like to say that we should actually appreciate things we have more, even if it's as stupid as emoji coding language :)

ps. I really admire the emoji language as it's amazing on the spectre of what is possible.... :D

So I've been doing work for a big ass real estate firm. Managing work of their 12 websites. A month ago they sent a prototype built with React.js which their design agency did. What we did was creating a backend API and an administration area and hooked the prototype to make it dynamic.
Everything was working quite great but around 2-3 days ago their guy who had been looking over the work of this React.js website came up and said that it isn't working in Internet Explorer 11. Bastard didn't mention this earlier throughout the whole month when we had provided him access to a staging server. I coldly replied that the prototype was provided by their design agency. But today the fucker put it all on us and said that it is something we implemented that caused this issue. I had to do some research but I finally managed to run the website in IE11. Bastard tried to steal my weekend.
Fuck IE11, fuck such pig clients, fuck Microsoft. IE, just DIE already you syphilis infected piece of whore's ass!

Being a Dev has its perks.

Started working a couple hours ago (yep, on a Saturday night) to get some code working for a demonstration of a system prototype on Monday.

The code in question was some recursive directory traversal tied in with some file generation in NodeJS. 2 hours later I nailed it, and the feeling of satisfaction of having that code working on all of your tests is overwhelming.

It's a different kind of excitement compared to sitting behind your desk at the office.

I talk to clients. I prepare the requirements. I design the database structure. I design prototype frontend. I do documentation. I code. I debug. I update change log.

I die.

When i made a little web prototype platformer game using js and then wanted to show my friends as they all wanted to play.

1. Setup all the files on my phone.
2. Made a web server on my phone with relevant file permissions.
3. Setup a web server on my phone and joined the network
4. Smile as it worked when they all connected through the browser to the relevant IP/port

This post just made me realise i need to get another phone lol

hehe..

So I showed a prototype of a new feature to my colleague and guess what !! He took the entire idea and implemented it. 😡

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

PM: Zip up the prototype and push it to a temporary folder on the master git repo.
Me: *twitch*

My oldies, they take me back. It's actually amazing I got my hands on a prototype for an LG phone from way back. It was never released to public. Android is in my roots...

You make a platformer game and prototype open source and someone uses it and people assume i must be upset because they "stole" my idea. Wtf, i made it fpr the community to make something cool and thats it!

Probably the most JavScript line I've written in awhile

I would like to rant one more time about my internship.

I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.

To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.

The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.

We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.

Here began the troubles.

We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.

She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.

The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.

To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.

Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.

Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.

Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.

Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.

They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.

Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...

I'm done fighting with my professor over my thesis project. They want me to go slower in building my project and we only have 7 weeks to deployment. Well screw you how in the hell do you expect me to prototype, build, bug fix and deploy all this and go SLOWER. YOU AREN'T AIMING TO BE A CAREER DEVELOPER ARE YOU?

I feel really sick this morning. Between the anxiety of graduating soon and my debt...

I just want live for myself. Not the sake of a school or some corporate entity. When this is over I want to work overseas in Europe. Do something for myself for once.

Since a few days I have my first dev job in a small it company. At my first day I directly stared to implement a rest api for managing dns servers.

Today I completed the prototype and all works well. What a feeling :)

"Oh, netbook is on low energy. Naaah, it should be enough for an hour."
- me, hours ago

One hour delay for the flight.

Suicide in front of the train.

Now I stand over two hours in the train and we cannot leave the train. All I want is finish my grot damn prototype...

Started off with a prototype with about 20 backend data points per hour and 10 concurrent front-end users. Total dataset in the 10,000s.

Now about 5 backend data points per second and 500 concurrent front-end users. Total dataset in excess of 20,000,000.

This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.

Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).

But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.

So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.

The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.

Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.

I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.

I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?

I was once asked to create a fully secure chat system prototype (the ui didn't matter) in 2 days. We ended up building a client in python (which I wrote) and it kinda worked and a c# backend that didn't really work.

1 hour before we had to present the project to some high up management we decided that we couldn't fix the bugs in the system.

So I came up with a cool idea. Why not use ssh?
So I set up a bash script that writes to a file and tail -f that reads from the file. That way you could chat securely with another person.
I made it 15 minutes before the presentation with no Internet working :) they said it was hacky but a cool solution they saw that day :p I felt happy and that I had to thank Linux for being there for me

That feeling when you've been at home for 20 minutes and already want to go back to work. Wait, no. Reverse that.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

When you're demoing a prototype and the guy who always introduces himself by saying he's "not the coding type," proceeds to try and tell you how he would have done it.

Just me, or am I the only one who loves using (Android) swipe keyboard to spell out "prototype"?

Okay, imposter syndrome just hit me real hard, when colleague, who just finished his first semester told me about his company he founded on the side based on an idea, for which he built a prototype in hackathon in a foreign country.

After work I'll definitely have to start working seriously on the sideproject I started some time ago, but always got distracted. Easiest way to install dual boot linux on my machine (512gb ssd, almost full; 1tb hdd, empty af), without the fear of fucking my windows completely up (of course I have a backup, but I'm still paranoid)? Also, which distro would you recommend for c++ game development?

When somebody demos a new app to the CIO as a functional product but turns out to be a concept prototype made with Origami without any proper code... literally a glorified PowerPoint with animations....

So this group of students (mostly girls) from university approached us to make them a prototype app for their semester's project, we had a first reunion to know about the idea and what they wanted us to do.

All they talked about was the color and some minor design stuff, we still don't exactly know what we're doing since it was difficult for us to get them to actually define the requirements and what the app should do.

We were supposed to have a second reunion for us to show them some ideas but the day of the meeting they didn't reply any of our messages.

I'm not the kind of guy who gets upset easily, but if you ask us for help and then let us hanging not really knowing what to do with your shitty project, fuck you.

So a guy made us develop a website, an Android app and an iOS app prototype under contract for a really low amount. We had initially agreed as it would be a learning experience.

3 months later we are still doing bug fixes for end-to-end deployment. For some reason we are responsible for publishing and deploying the whole system. He hasn't paid us anything yet and has given a shitty LOR which has been taken off the net.

This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.

So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.

Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.

Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.

While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.

He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.

So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

So I'm working on this prototype of indie game with two friends. Since we are only 3, I can't just stick to coding only... Problem is, I'm the only one realising that and I've ended up doing all the jobs that are missing... Texturing, a bit of modeling, organizing the whole team, shaders, animating and so on... And the two others just stick to their thing and are confident in the fact that I'll be able to handle all the problems. It pisses me off.
But I need the project to have some base experience, and alone, I would probably melt down under the stress. But every time a problem show up I'm basically alone, and my level of stress skyrocket... Not sure if I have the shoulders to finish it, but I have to. In fact I'm not even to the point of ranting anymore I'm just depressed >.>... At least when I'm working on the code and not the rest, I'm really enjoying myself.

Not sure if I should do something about it ._.

A colleague of mine had a 'great idea' and started a crowdfunding project on kickstarter;
A microblogging application to host on your own server. The max amount of characters per message was 140.
The prototype was even built on bootstrap!
Such a original idea!!

This rant is about myself and anyone whos like me: using logs over a debugger

So, sometimes when I wanna quick check something or make sure, if and when something get's executed or I've ran into a Problem, I add a few log/print statements to check in console.

But I don't think about proper and helpful messages, since they aren't supposed to stay in code. So I often type what comes in my mind, like memes or song lyrics.

The last time this became a huge act, was Code review/ Prototype demonstration with Clients (which I didn't knew about, otherwise I would have removed them, I swear) and Boss and my Code printed "show bob and va...", "send nudes" and stuff... in loop... to stdout

I've been working for 6 months now, and the boss tells me he's not satisfied with my work compared to someone that has 15+ years experience. He clearly states that for him - it's more important lines of code, than planning and defining the architecture which he don't like because that doesn't provide anything...

Of course, I can just jump into the code if that is whats important. I've seen the code produced by the other guy, and its shit.

The guy is a talker, and knows how to talk. I'm more like, hey lets create a simple design prototype or do some UML diagrams to get a better visualization of what we need.

Anyway, its just annoying to be compared to someone with many years of experience, its not that I can achieve it overnight...

I think my client have a gift, he always know exactly where not to go or not to click...
Man, let me show you the prototype with peace !

I just watched "Venom" in 3D.
That was awesome. I also loved the "Parasite" manga and anime reference. Plus, they made the labours and weapons of the aliens look like those from the game "Prototype" 1 and 2.
Would really watch the future movies of Venom and recommend everyone who did not watch this movie to watch it. It is a masterpiece.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a mobile app development company to make a clone of the current contacts app. 3 points from 10 mins conversations;

1. They offered me for a working prototype in just 35% of actual app development cost. They'll take 15 days to work on that. ( Me: "Do you mean the prototype that I created in 40 mins using invision and sent you its video recording?" after a little argument they agreed that they meant the same.)

2. They said they will have to embed the complete search engine in the app. (Really!! we never name searching in DB as "search engine")

3. They said they'll take approx 15 days in UI and UX. (Me: "will you change the designs I shared?" They: "It is our internal process, we can't give much detail on that")

Hey guys, hope you all have a great day.

I am not a professional developer yet because I still didn't have my first client. My goal is to become a freelance Web Developer.

At me moment I working on my own website because I can't hope to find a client if I don't even exist on the Internet.

I already have some kind of prototype but the problem is that it looks really bad in my eyes because I'm anything but a designer.

So my question is if you know any resources where I can learn web design, trends, good practices, theories, anything really.

Never add some actual features to a prototype, or you'll end up with a prototype in production...

There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.

Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.

If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.

Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.

Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.

Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)

Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.

But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.

But you can have json columns in postgres too!

Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.

Oh god where do I start!?

In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.

The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.

That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.

I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.

I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.

I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:

PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.

The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.

Also recently, and in another direction:

PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.

*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.

Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*

I'll think of more when I can.

Manager X: (logs a support ticket) "Agent is unable to access system using the password provided."

Me: "You're going to have to narrow it down a little, we have over 1000 active agents."

I hate the support side of my job...

We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?

Well... It's not all white and black...

As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...

Let me take an example:

Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.

Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.

So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.

A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.

So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.

Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?

Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?

---

Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.

We had a meeting with our customer and showed them our prototype. The prototype had a fancy GUI.

The customer looked at the prototype and said: well, it looks nice but I don't know. In some kind the Gui don't flashes me. Make it so that it flashes me.

Might start asking monthly or weekly questions just for the hell of it so heres number 1...

If you have a prototyping/code naming convention, what is it and why?

This is inspired from another rant I just commented on.

Would you rather build something that was technically pristine and something other coders would salivate over, but no-one used it

OR

build a hacky mess that was shit technically but became a “hit” with users.

This morning, I decided I'm gonna do some Android development. I opened Android Studio (closing 2 Firefox windows to reclaim enough RAM), launched the Android Emulator and then proceeded with my coding.
Since, I've almost finished a prototype app, translated a good 100 strings, had lunch, updated 2 server and THE EMULATOR IS STILL BOOTING!
My Android dev friend tells me this "just happens sometimes". WHAT?!?
I'm genuinely starting to think that good software doesn't exist anymore...

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Today we had to pitch our prototype design dashboard for DICTU. They develop every site for the Dutch ministries and where really enthusiastic!

We did a bit extra and developed our prototype. They really appreciated the hard work!

Lead: alright people what are your ideas and updates for this page refactor we've been talking about.

dipshit: Alright guys, I've done a quick awesome prototype that I really like...

dipshit: *starts to speak super fast* (I catch words about function composition, clean, no side effects, speed, efficiency. Basically a string of brogrammer buzzwords.)

me: what did you mean by that? How does it work?

dipshit: *basically repeats the same drivel*

me: uh..ok I don't quite understand

everyone else looks confused.

me: ok since you've done a prototype, we take a look at it later

*** After meeting, looks at code ***

It was COMPLETE GARBAGE. He used 1,500+ lines of js in 17 files to make what was essentially a simple 2 item list.

We were looking at a way to overhaul the entire page, he "refactored" maybe perhaps 5% of the page.

There was absolutely nothing clean / functional / composable about this monstrosity. It was as if he read chapter 1 of a book on functional programming and decided he understood enough to call himself an expert.

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL HIRED?

HOW DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A DEVELOPER?

YOU ARE SELF TAUGHT, DISS PEOPLE WITH FORMAL CS/CE DEGREES AND YOU PRODUCE TRASH CODE?!

ARE YOU SO RETARDED THAT YOU DO NOT RECOGNIZE HOW STUPID YOU ARE?

Please die in a fire, along with your jock attitude and unprofessionalism. Take this worthless junk unfit to be called code with you.

-get an idea for a game
-lay down the plan
-prototype with basic shapes
-max hype
-realize that I can't draw/model to save my life
-give up

ECMAScript is everywhere, so I thought: Let's do even more inappropriate and insane things with it ;)

...Like using Duktape (small ECMAScript engine) and exposing LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress along with some helper routines to describe the routine's argument types and return type, and finally providing a routine to invoke those routines.

It's a very rough prototype that can handle up to 4 arguments in a 64-bit Windows environment.

Next "todo" is structure handling which will initially be a case of stuffing data into a Buffer() object.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to do with it or why...

What do you think about class-based OOP vs. Prototype-based OOP?
I think that class-based OOP is an unnecessary abstraction of structs, functions and global variables most of the time.

!rant

So this has probably been asked loads of times but I've never seen it. When working on solo projects for yourself do you still use source control like git or mercurial?

I usually don't because when I do personal projects its usually filthy and fast development to prototype quickly.

However, this current project I'm working on I am using git and I'm finding that slowing myself down just to follow good practice is actually improving my code quality and my understanding of my own project.

Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.

It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel

Manager said we need to use Queue. Several meetings after then I looked at prototype by 6 senior devs:

A QueueListener connects to RabbitMQ check for payload then *disconnects*;

A TaskProvider in ASP.Net.MVC.Core(whatever it is) listening http and dependency inject that QueuePoller;

A Visual Cron timer calls that http url every 5 minutes.

Wait for it: a set of database tables to store messages for another MessageProcessor.

It’s a XML to CSV file conversion project consists of 43 unique projects under a solution. I did it within 500 lines of Node with ElasticSearch and told we don’t use fancy new stuffs here.

Is it highly likely that, those at high position of management are more greedy of money and posses less ethics and values, than those who actually build the company ie engineers ?

I had seen, it's always the top management who get away from mistakes/ issues but generally it's those who develop the company at core i.e. engineers again, are sidelined or considered responsible for the mistake, when management don't know a shit about anything, or sometimes engineers just follow what management says and management fucks their asses wide even if the management did something wrong.

Who do you think actually build companies/product. Engineers or management or marketers/sales people, who eats fat cheques ??

I remember from silicon valley, when hooli reverse engineered Richards idea and developed their own prototype named Nucleus. Pushed their engineers to beat pipe Piper and when their product turns out to be awfully terrible and extremely fucked like a burned dick with broken balls, they just fired their entire nucleus division

Finally leaving a job that I've been working at. All we did was maintain a codebase that was originally built as a prototype by an intern, with no hopes of getting a green light on refactoring or rewriting. So glad I'm no longer part of that mess. Don't know why I'm writing this but it's just like a weight has lifted off my shoulders.

Somewhere half of the project, after just placing a new version on staging I get an email from the customer:

" This is really going the wrom way! Everything is so big, and what happened to the original design? The one I agreed to! I really dont like this, please go back to the way it was!!!"

I replied asking him what exactly wasnt as the original design (We really followed the prototype we had showed him earlier)

So the next day I get this email:

"Whoops, turns out I was still zoomed at 150%. I guess it was a bit of an overreaction.."

Couldnt believe this :')