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.

:)

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Experimenting & prototyping

This moment you realise your GUI fake just went to a paying customer. Boss decided it looked like it is working and ordered release without asking ...

10 years of repeating cycles of the following:

#interview
them: yeah, this is a gamedev position, c#, unity, prototyping, maybe some hololens r&d

me: cool! exactly what i was looking for, as i said a few times, i can't do php anymore, it literally causes me literal deppression.

them: don't worry, we have people for thaz, but we have nobody for c# and unity, with some art skills feel as well as you do.

me: great, glad we're on the same page. i'm taking the job! <3

them: great! oh btw, there's this enterprise intranet app in php that needs some additions, can you please do them?

me: ... what did we talk about during my interview?

them: yeah, but it's just gonna be a short thing, don't worry.

me: ...well...ok, i think i can do that.

*3 to 6 months still on the same, or the next, php enterprise bullshit app. i'm totally exhausted in all ways possible, stressed literally permanently, dreading every day, every new ticket, every meeting every contact with everyone, not able to give a shit about what i do anymore, thinking about suicide*

them: you lazy incompetent fuckup, you're fired!

* i stop communicating and coming out of my room for anything else than toilet, and shopping. stop communicating with my friends, with anyone, anxiety and exhaustion caused by even the thought of talking to anyone about anything, or doing anything, is usually unbearable. i spend 3 to 8 months like this, just sleeping, drinking, watching youtube, sometimes playing games but even that "activity", or rather even the thought of that "activity" is often exhausting. after that time, i kind of recuperate emotionally and mentally, start looking for another unity+c# gamedev job, find it, apply,
goto #interview

Nice day for prototyping ! Hope the sun comes out after lunch :)

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

Prototyping a new operating system for Smart Mini Displays (Embedded Linux System) that can run even on low-end ARM motherboards.

My best CS teacher was the most passionate dev I've ever met. He is still teaching Software Engineering at 65, and he's reached that unreachable level of nerdiness, when you are more of a philosopher than just a coder.

Random anecdote: back in 2010, we both spent Christmas week playing and prototyping with Lego Mindstorms and Android, in preparation for my bachelor thesis project!

daily.
me: i looked into the customer dev's project and even though it's C#, i can use it as a source of inspiration for my own C++ library.
PM: okay, maybe we can even still use it, so that you use a C# dll with your C++ code.
me: ...
other colleague: that's a bad idea. it can already be a challenge to use unmanaged c++ in dotnet, but the other way round it's even more difficult. C# and C++ are languages that behave quite differently and it will be hard to implement a correctly working interface.
PM: okay. well... then please analyze this project's complexity in terms of LOC and create a class diagram, so we get an idea of how complex it is.
me: sure.
PM: hmm... maybe we should split this topic. since dev x will also rely on your library, analyze this project together with him, each of you look at another part of the classes.
me: that's.... i think that's a bad idea. implementing this functionality in this library is my job, not of dev X. he won't be involved in implementing any of the funcionalities and for him, it shouldn't matter how this works.
PM: yeah, but since we are prototyping, maybe we should just violate the "separation of concerns" rule.
me (internally): (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

in the end i could convince him to do it my way, but for fuck's sake... when was the last time he actually succesfully implemented something? 🤦‍♀️

We have a course in our uni where we're given a client and are supposed to make a product for him.
> Only, our client happens to be a startup guy.
> He's already mentioned that his app is worth 'multi-millions' countless times.
> And has already given us a job offer in his startup.
> And has offered to pitch the app to investors if we do it right and split the profit (He seemed almost convinced Google would acquire it).

All of it before doing any market research, testing, business planning or prototyping himself.
Yet people ask me why i hate on the hyped up startup ecosystem smh :/

Legitimately haven't written a single piece of code in months... I feel truly broken!

Haven't even done my usual of prototyping 456 things and then immediately shelving them, maybe it's time to get back in the game

I loved my previous job. It paid shit but I learned so much. Starting from prototyping to production. DevOps, Development etc. I started a new job 1 year ago. It pays great but man, I only do “if-else” nothing else.

My old boss contacted me for some contract job because the dev that he hired after me, not only he didn’t do anything, but broke production and all other systems on a Friday before going on vacation. So the company went old school with excel spreadsheet to keep track of orders.

I accepted the contract job and man. I’ve learned so much these past 2 weeks, working only ~ 10 hrs / week.

I swear to god, Stardew Valley is some form of crack cocaine, my partner got an xbox and a copy of it, I played it ages ago and got a little taste from her, now I have just been playing it non stop again.

Planed to do some prototyping and get some of my game engine finished but nope... My parsnips need me!

I always read the full job description whenever there's a job hiring.

I have a keen eye in some job description that this company is a red flag.

"Must have 4 years of experience in Blazor or other related web development"

"Be a multitasker"
"Must have experience in frontend web development using Figma or other prototyping tools"

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?

PM wants to integrate a new library to our application. I spend a week prototyping a demo only to be informed that this integration already exists in the application.

Mfw

Sometimes lack of confidence in one area reveals oversight cockyness in stronger areas:

Set up a simple login system from Unity engine to php to mysql db, using android device ID as the login id. Set up database column to accept 32 length varchar for MD5 hashed strings, as I knew the method I was getting the android device ID was automatically being hashed that way and more or less was what I wanted anyway.

Spend 2 days wondering why it would insert the logins with 0 issue, but could never retrieve them. Due to lack of web development and PHP skills, I assumed I was screwing up the handling of mysqli_num_rows() (to check whether I was inserting or selecting in the query) or simply screwing up my SQL queries.

Rewrite the code a few times, even went back to a method I had used in the past.

Today it dawned on me that my testing machines deviceID had been getting trimmed to the 32 character limit. Turns out I didn't account for my workstations device ID to be automatically hashed like the android device id is.

For 2 days I was obtaining and sending a 40 character string to a 32 character limit varchar and blaming my lack of PHP skills........

Back to my niche I go!

ok. been going full steam since December with 1 day off since. managing teams, review designs, designing, prototyping, code reviewing, mentoring, and doing project. management. i get that it's a "flat" org structure but hire proper PMs and BAs instead of trying to pinch pennies. all the while, i see marketing with deeeeeeep pockets spending money on anything like mommy and daddy are funding their spring break getaway. i need time to disconnect and recharge my spirit.

Got an idea that needed prototyping, remembered that people always said Bootstrap is a good UI framework for quick prototyping. Had a doubt though, as the last time I checked Bootstrap sucks.

I ended up wasting hours to make it work with webpack. Turned out it still sucks.

The most irritating thing was they tell people to install the latest beta, or even alpha version on their website, not the stable one. Who the fuck would do that?

When you do the bare `npm install bootstrap`, it will install the latest stable version, but the docs page defaults to the... guess what, the latest beta version. I wasted nearly an hour just to figure out why the styles weren't working like the examples in the docs.

Has any of you reached a point that you want to resign from work because of a client?

We are dealing with a client at work that uses the app for prototyping instead of making designers create wireframe, imagine the amount of code to write,edit, remove, write it again and yet there is always something isn't right from the client point of view.

What is even worse backend guys screw the server and I am the one to be blamed for errors: 5xx
I even get blamed for error 400 (bad request) when that request passes tests but out of a sudden server returns 400, when you hit refresh the exact same moment of error and server decides to return data and stop throwing error 400.

I also get blamed for server fails to return data from a search endpoint, and if server throws 403 for a public endpoint.

This isn't a rant or getting out of my system but I need opinions, I've been working on this project for a year, with complete mess from either client or backend team, if any of you is instead of me, what would you do?

I'm not a complete guy either, but that situation is just beyond my abilities to handle.

What do you think about my language choice set for the future (knowing I want to work as a software and app developer) ? Anything to add / remove ?

- C++: Fast and well-documented, so I think it's a standard even in the next decades to come

- Java: Although I think that this language will more likely die in the next decade, I'll maybe keep this language because some dinosaurs enterprises still rely on it. Ah and mainly because it's still widely used in Android apps programming. For now.

Talking about Android, does learning Kotlin worth it ?

- Python: Will mainly use it for automation and prototyping, but nothing more, as it seems not to be widely use in the software development field (or it is ?). I'll also keep it for hobbies, however.

- Rust: This language seems to be a rising star in the industry since it is very clean, classic, as fast as C / C++ while introducing more safety. However I'll wait a bit for this one since it requires more complicated and abstract knowledge I do not have yet.

- Javascript (or more particularly JSX): Hurts to say I'll keep it, even more than Java. I'd let it in the web development hell I won't step in if it was not used in webapps / cross-platform mobile applications. And since this kind of stuff looks trendy, I don't think I can avoid it. Plus, I liked working with React Native. Sorry.

- C#: Seems to be a must when working on Windows software interfaces, so guess I'll have to learn this one. Will do so gladly, it looks better than Java

"The next time you’re caught in a room full of smart people doing something dumb (like trying to anticipate what your users will do), tune them out, flip open your laptop, and start prototyping." - Daniel Burka

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.

I'm in this university software engineering course, where the professor decides he need to teach us the entire history of software engineering.

Dude, we were taught how to use SVN in addition to Git. Huh? And for software development processes, we were taught a total of 7 of them. There're: code and fix, waterfall, prototyping, spiral, phased, agile and lean. And the tests are like "list 5 advantages and disadvantages for X, and compare them to the advantages and disadvantages of Y". Wtf dude. I don't mind memorizing things, but the things I learn aren't even relevant (except agile and lean). Nobody would be impressed if I say I know SVN in an interview. What am I doing with my life. Ok, back to cramming this shit cuz i need my GPA. Bye.

I am trying to reverse engineer a fingernail hardening device for rapid hardware prototyping (becoming some kind of hardware developer I guess)

Since it is a fucking mess (all cables are black) they've chosen a weird construct to operate microcontroller on 240Vac (seems to be possible and made in very low energy consuming devices) i do not find any datasheet for one of the used products. It would help a lot but no. And messing around with high voltage is no fun.

I'm unsure if this fits as a dev rant since most/all I've read so far are software-related.

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.

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?

How do you guy (think of) prototype UI?

I have used the pen and paper approach but when you add the interactions such as clicks and animation on the paper,it become messy.

I feel that coding up a full blown front end for prototyping is overkill. Because when you want to prototype the list , you also need to insert the dummy data in order for you see probably clicks and drag animation.

Just started a prototyping learn program

Just tried out Jupyter Notebook for the first time. I can see why software engineers wouldn't like notebooks, especially if you intend to actually publish the notebook as code for other people to use (please publish a module that can be imported, not a notebook that has to be hacked to pieces to make it reusable), but it's pretty handy for early prototyping or documentation.

I'm playing around with save-editing for a few GBA games as a personal project, and I used a Notebook to document the save file format with examples.

Currently we have zero time for R&D at work, now I have convinced management to let me try and convince them to arrange some time per week/sprint(2 weeks) or month

How should I approache this? And how much time would be optional (enough time for prototyping but still leave more than enough time for the projects we have) ?

Any tips that you have for negotiation/convincing management would be greatly appreciated!! 😁😁

Off late I've been having a lot of debate with my friend about using Flask over Django for prototyping some feature. I side with Flask, since the development time is much lesser than Django and doesn't need to follow a lot of rules.

Issue here is, I prefer flask and he prefers Django.

Need opinion on this sort of problem, where a prototype for a feature in a product has to be built. It maybe integrated into the end product, which is in Django, or may not be.

!rant
Any good sites/tools for fast web design prototyping? (like jsfiddle but without having to refresh the view (at least manually))

You might think that I'd know better and stop caring about the design while prototyping, but I still can't help it work 4 times as long on the layout than the actual logic

Been consulting a friendly acquaintance on technical issues for some time now. An interesting side project in a field that I am not familiar. Well after some time you begin to be well versed and understand what it's all about.

Wrote some code. Made a website. Did some soldering and prototyping. Now I find myself in a position where most of the IP is a) written by me b) designed by me.

An official agreement has been a topic couple of times. The owner wants to hire me, but I don't see myself working there. He offered shares. I said yes. But nothing has been formalized.

Now the the CEO sends me an NDA that practically tries to make me sign over all the IP to the company. First correspondence I get from him since the beginning. Legislation is quite clear. Without written agreement IP is owned by the creator.

I lolled. They must think I am dumb because I try to help. I feel a hefty invoice for services provided generating in my accounting..

Got mixed feelings about dart/flutter 😕

On one hand, I find it very easy to work with and very fast for prototyping. Everything is smooth once you compile it.

On the other hand, I keep running into weird as shit bugs and missing functionality. The bugs are primarily related to iOS, so that might not entirely be their fault. Last one required me to delete the entire project and rebuild it, the clean command didn't work shit.
It's quite annoying that so many features are missing, but I guess that's life, when you try to work with a multi platform language...

Prototyping is making me feel more and more like an idiot. Thing ain't drawing correctly? It's because a month ago I had a copy paste error and I was doing am unnecessary conversion. Thing is crashing because of file access errors? The 3rd party shared file reader I was trying to use but didn't need opens streams in the constructor and didn't close them in a destructor/finalizer.

Actually any Hackathon where I'm trying to build or implement something that I (at least at the start of the Hackathon) Have no idea on how to build

Where I spend maybe half (or more) of the Hackathon on rapid prototyping and learning asap to be done in time

I get such a motivational rush that one time I even managed to stay up and productive for roughly 42 hours straight

And the knowledge that I got during that Hackathon (bash scripting) got me into server management, I even use some of my scripts daily.. so last year was a huge payoff for me 😇

Actually pretty funny that this is the question of the week, because this week I am going to a yearly Hackathon

some languages completely get lost in minutiae, disposable preciousism that looks pretty but mischievously gobble development cycles. Now, there's no doubt they make for skinnier, trustworthy, low maintenance code, yes, congratulations Haskell. Although, you see, Haskell, not every language out here is defacto an academic one. You hear me, Rust. So, for fuck sakes, Rust dear. You've macros, sis, you don't need a new languages feature every other naughty day. You need prototyping speed, not more complexity. I'm not complaining not really.... It's your fucking language server, your compiler... They can't take this shit no more. Have you seen their overeating problems? Please, Rust, stop picking plastic surgery instead of make-up and use macros instead

--
and google, dear, your auto completion sucks ass

A week of vacation has begun, and every time it feels like I'm joining the Nights' Watch:

"Night gathers, and now my watch begins.... the watch to see how long it is before I actually WANT to go back to work. Tuesday? Wednesday? How long IS my Netflix queue anyway? Ugh, can't go anywhere, COVID done fucked that all up, so me and the couch are on a first-name basis again. Shit, should I check email, like, just quick, so I don't have thousands to go through next Monday? Oh, maybe I should spend some time prototyping that new screen... no, gotta keep from thinking about work! Oh, there's a big list of home repairs I need to do, now I have time... no, fuck that, that shit sucks. Hmm, maybe I should start that game project I was excited about a week ago? Nah, I'm not really excited by it now, never mind. I guess I could play some Halo again... no, that's boring. I wonder if my team managed to do the deployment today, and how those tickets I Ieft them are coming... ah shit, I want to go back to work ALREADY!"

That's how George R.R. Martin wrote it, right??

So I'm in my last year of university. The GPA is high. Did one internship the summer after second year in one of the best companies in my country. Third year in my department we do a semester long internship for 5 months, I joined a company and worked on back-end using Go. This was the spring semester and I wanted to continue working in the summer. The internsip company didn't tell me anything so I looked for a job. Found one that paid great, I was getting the salary a new graduate was getting. I worked as a full-stack there. Mostly prototyping, the company was new and I was in the R&D side. After 2 months the company had some budgetary problems and we parted ways. I was in the market again for part-time job in my senior year and because of my prior experience with Go, a friend mentioned me to a company executive he met and I had an interview and got in as a full-stack part-time dev. This was for some background information.

My story is;

The work is actually great in terms of what I do. I'm learning a lot here. The problem is that I'm having imposter syndrome for the first time ever. The projects are demanding and because that I'm part-time they take time to finish. There are no due dates or anything but sometimes the CEO is coming to me and saying "Aren't you finished with it?" or "Are you going to finish it soon?". Because that I'm more qualified in Javascript and React when they gave me my current frontend project I told them that its better if they give javascript/frontend projects from now on so that I can do a better job finishing them. What the CEO told me after that was, "Then hopefully you'll finish them sooner.". The people are nice and stuff like this only happened 2-3 times and the lead that I'm working with acknowledges my pros and cons and we have a good relationship, when I do something wrong he tells me why and how I can improve my code. But I just can't get over the syndrome and for some time I actually thought they would fire me when they get a full time dev.

Everything is great for some time. It's my fourth month and I think I felt this way because this is the most demanding job I have with senior year and also I didn't know people that well because I was the new guy. Although I still have concerns, have you ever felt this way? If you share tips or any recommendations I would feel great.

Thank you for reading.

Holy fuck... why didnt I know about Fritzing earlier... AND WHY ISNT IT SUPPORTED ANYMORE! Its such a fucking great tool... Its so fucking great... I never used a tool so fucking capable for Prototyping with my circuits...

There's no favourite coding challenge for me. Of course I do them when I'm asked to but I don't think anyone can derive how Well someone works from these short toy challenges.

I once had a proper prototyping Challenge that was really fun. I had to Work on it in advance to the interview. I had to define the scope and how much time I will spend in it in advance and then explain and defend the scoping and all technological/architecture decisions and handle proper criticism in the interview. No bullshit coding challenges Had to be solved :)
I think these prototyping challenges will Tell you way more about an applicant and his worth as a dev than those little challenges ever could.

Really starting to reconsider being a game developer, I can never seem to get anything past engine prototyping. So many idea's, so many concepts, I have the ability to build it but I can't get past the first hurdle and it's really bringing me down...

Don't even have any dev friends to help me out...

What are your use cases for noSql dbs? I haven't really found a reason beyond stuff like chat messages or logs, but even those tend to work perfectly fine with SQL.

I imagine they're pretty good for prototyping, but haven't really tried them out for that yet. Perhaps for cases where you're handling billions of records?

Opinions

Hello, I’m considering building a web framework.

My ideal features would be:
Customizable authentication system(considering using a jwt lib)
Embedded DB(bolt db)
ORM( writing my own)
REST api to DB (via code generator)
Code generator(generation of models and views via cli)
GUI to db(some admin dashboard)
CORS(web service right?)

Why?
Ease of development
Fast prototyping of small-medium web services.
Fun.

My question is, do i have to many things on my platter? Should i narrow it down into less featured framework? What feature should I focus on? How should i benchmark it? Should i write tests for absolutely everything or just for exported methods? What should i take into consideration when developing ORM API, Auth API...

The language is Go

Thank you for your input

Control projects already realized
Design in Figma and Prototyping
Class diagram
code
*I wake up from sleep*

I really want to use mock design tools in order to better design my UI layouts, but my main working environment is Linux, and almost all design and prototyping tools I found until now have only Windows or Mac OS ports.

Can't do rapid prototyping and still support IE 😂😂😂

"The next time you’re caught in a room full of smart people doing something dumb (like trying to anticipate what your users will do), tune them out, flip open your laptop, and start prototyping." - Daniel Burka

When you're agreed with prototyping sdlc then suddenly it became waterfall model.

"I'm thinking there's some lack of additional features that might be needed by our clie-"
"NO! CAN THE SOFTWARE WORK? WE NEED TO RELEASE TOMORROW "
"Yes it works ok deliver tomorrow"

Fucking cheesedick hobo here comes another deployment Friday that tops another nice fucking shit on your degenerative brain to come up with such a plan

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

Shit fuck. Shit. When you land back to earth, after having a nice prototyping session with a new api.

Is there an open source (or free) service for website prototyping?

Hi,
So I have been using colab for the past 2 years. I liked how without any setup you can use kernels with GPU and TPU with some configuration.

But recently I can't train any model. It always goes runtime error, runtime disconnected, not to mention they have limited their total hours of usage for a day.

I know you are providing everything for free but this is just annoying. I dont mind if google wants to start a subscription plan for colab...its much better for fast prototyping than getting a cloud server from google or aws or anything of such sorts.

I have been trying to train a model with only 3 gigs of data and I cant complete the model, once I change the tab it shows Runtime Disconnected. DAMN it.

Sadly, I am trying not to use colab from now on.
But yeah I am frustrated with colab and their services.

Visual Studio hanging on "Finding Templates" popup on "new item" click, has got to be one of the worst KLPDs mid-prototyping. Stability's down the drain ever since they realised they can push shit code and fix it in updates every 2nd week.

Hi all,

Are there any developer tools that you wish were available for React, Angular or Vue?

A few schoolmates and I are looking to build an open source developer tool in order to help current engineers who are working with some of the popular front end technologies, such as React, Angular and Vue. We have seen a few prototyping tools for React and Vue and we also came across Bit Dev for React - would angular or vue developers like a tool like Bit Dev? We are looking to build something impactful and meaningful to the community and would really like your opinion on any developers tools that you would like to see.

Way to go ruin a collaboration. I wanted to have fun some making a game with one of my friends, but turns out being friends doesn't correlate to making a good team. Some of you probably know this, but I've never had such an experience, not even to almost strangers

Some tips on how to kill off any motivation to work with you:
* Casually insult other peoples ideas
* Don't consider other people's point of view
* Try to talk people out of prototyping/experimenting with their OWN ideas on their OWN time
* Completely undermine their skill even though you have no basis to go on
* Never worked with this person before
* less experienced
* don't have to give estimates on a daily basis
* don't consider the fact that there are libraries that can be used to speed up things)
* Victimize yourself, because someone is "forcing you" to become the bad guy

I don't know if that person is on here and I don't care if they happen to read this. I tried to treat you with the most respect, but if you don't do the same then just fuck off.

Anyways, there goes the idea of a "no stress, no problems" game dev project, because I wanted to see if isometric view would work better than top down.

My idea to have another person to work on a project with, to keep the motivation up backfired a by lot.

Someone within european timezones up for some hobby game dev?

I keep hearing: "Laravel is better than CakePHP", "CakePHP is just for prototyping, not for serious development", "if you want to do it properly, use Laravel", "Laravel is a lot more powerful than CakePHP" etc. etc.

Why is it that people think Laravel is so superior?
Anyone who can give proper arguments for this? because when I ask those persons tho elaborate, they can't...

jquery and php is an old combination, people hate it to the core but when you want fast prototyping, you don't even think of using anything else!