So my actual job is being a nurse at the local hospital, with coding being just a hobby. However, the way some IT–Related things are treated here are just mind-blowing. Here are some examples:

Issue: Printer is not recognized by network anymore due to not being properly plugged in

Solution: Someone has to tell the house technician, if the house technician is currently not available, ask his assistant who only works part time and like twice a week. House technician took the printer (God knows why), came back 2 days later and plugged it back in.

Issue: Printer 1 of 2 on ICU has run out of ink and since all computers default to printer 1, nobody can print.

Solution: Call the house technician, blah blah, house technician comes, takes ink cartridge of printer 2 and puts it into printer 1.

Issue: Public WiFi is broken, can be connected to but internet access is missing. Probably config issue as a result of a recent blackout.

Solution: Buy a new router, spend 5 days configuring it and complain about how hard networking is.

Issue: Computer is broken, needs to be exchanged with a new one, but how do we transfer the data?

Solution: Instead of just keeping the old hard drive, make a 182GB backup, upload it to the main file server and then download it again on the new computer.

Issue: Nurse returns from vacation, forgot the password to her network account.

Solution: Call the technician who then proceeds to open a new account, copies all the files from the old one and tells her to pick an easier password this time. She chooses "121213".

1. If your contract allows it (and it should), get more involved in public dev community. Your employer benefits greatly from making a small closed source core product, with a giant open source ecosystem around it. Write public articles. Working in a community larger than one single business is fun.

2. Start a company coding club, a "labs" division, work in a slightly more exotic language. Great if your employer gives you time, but using some of your own is worth it too. Work on non critical tools, creative experiments. Sometimes you stumble onto incredibly valuable ideas which would never have popped up if you had strictly followed stakeholder requirements.

3. Listen to your body. If you feel restless, go for a run. If you feel tired, take a nap. If you're stuck, wander around the company. If you feel down, go find a place with more than a dozen trees. And always have a notepad nearby for doodling!

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

"Isn't that Java?" - bypassing stranger who happens to look over your shoulder when you're coding in public.

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

My colleagues broke down our AWS account by hard coding the AWS access API keys and pushing the same code to a public repository. This took down our system for nearly 3 days.

I kid you not, one of my designer friends dipped his toes into coding, he ran into a problem...

Wondered why the following function wasn't returning a random number...

public Int getRandomNumber(){
return 4;
}

#facePalm #stickToDesigning

Coding with dark theme in public transport cuz I love to live dangerous 😈

When my idiot technical lead on the client’s floor (where everyone could hear him), “corrected” me in public telling me I should never use parent/child classes and override a method. Instead just use lots of if else statements in the one.

Not just is he a moron, but sounds like he knows what he is talking about if you are a client who knows nothing about coding. So I look like an idiot to our customers and he sounds smart... when it’s the other way around.

And HOW DARE you criticize anyone, even if it is warranted, in public in front of clients. You go in an office and close a door.

This must be the most unforgettable Chinese New Year to me.
People are checking body temperature everywhere, and restricting traffic. All theaters, parks, any public places are shut down. People are told to stay home, which is what I have been doing in the past 2 weeks. Most of the time I was coding. It's kind of frustrating. I don't know how long this will last. Situation looks severe from the news.

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

My first dev project. That is a toughie. Years ago (1998) I did some BASIC programming in HS. Then a few years after that (somwhere between 2002 and 2006) I did a lot of video game editing with hex editors and other tools to replace dialog to translate video games from Japanese to English, but there was not much coding there.

The first one I remember in recent times that involved any kind of coding was back in 2012/2013, there was a save state editor for Final Fantasy III on android (it didn't work for the iOS saves) but the editor was in Chinese. I ended up working with someone else to change it to English, so that others could use it easier. After that, I decided to code one from scratch for a different game.

I spent weeks working on it, and finally released a save editor for Final Fantasy Dimensions (I made sure it worked for both iOS and Android save files). It was my first great achievement, however it was way to many lines of code (I didn't know about loops or arrays back then, so I had a lot of repeating code). I eventually ended up making ones for Final Fantasy IV and VI, however those were never released to the public, as I had trouble getting the CRC to calculate properly every time.

This led me down the path I am now, going for my Bachelor's in IST with a specialization in Programming.

Best non dev activity for me is riding public transports home after coding. It's so underwhelming that my brain focuses really well - comes with the problem of looking crazy when I take out my laptop in the middle of the subway

questions in our mind as soon as we see someone coding in public place:
» What is he/she working on?
» Is that person better than me?
and then we finally judge him/her as a showoff! 😂

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

So there is this project of my firm that is comepletly dependant on Facebook api, I've actually told it many times to managers at first but they've just waved their hands over it.

Now what didn't happen. Facebook data leak and the api being taking down ..juust a week before the project going public.

Our app is still not reviewed and not able to access the so vital api and there are actually many similar projects getting published (even Facebook Local greatly rivals to our app, actually killing it because they have native data... And we don't have any. )

I told them again. "Nah we will have this and this feature that makes it soo exceptionall."

And you are sitting here thinking if the salary you have asked for is still good enough to stay or to run away.

(Well, I am still getting some coding experience from this so that's why I stay, and oh yeah I have the backend repo only for myslef because except the frontend dev no managers knows what git is. This is how freedom feels. )

how do you deal with workplace bullies? or is it just me who feels certain types of talks and actions are a bit intimidating and contributes to a hostile workplace environment?

i usually feel this around people of power. like say you are a TL and you are casually flexing the power to impact X guy's KPI scores in response to a funny taunt about holidays, while some guy Y from same team is in proximity whose leaves are not yet approved, isn't it some kind of intentional bullying?

or like there is some discussion goin on with TL and dev, where dev is trying to justify some reason for something, and suddenly the SSE jumps in between, start agreeing with the TL, adds a few jokes deviating the situation and the dev is left with his reasons and justifications undermined?

or like when some messup occurs by the team and TL suddenly pulls out a threatening card citing "people spending extra time in tt/leaving early" or some other reason as cause/punishment of messup?

Why do people of power need to make us remember that there is someone above us? and why does this need to be done in public?

lets say even if there are some notorious elements in team, who does take leaves on important days, and who are giving poor performance due to slacking/TT/early signoff, why should i be also told about it? just to get a warning?

And let's assume that there ARE people whose work is not causing the mess. They ARE doing good timely work and there are no complaints (not even the ones that don't reach public ear) , how should they not get intermediated by such situations?

I will not say i am the most perfect person doing the best of coding, but if i am being constantly kept in an atmosphere of fear and power; and being constantly cut/over powered during my discussions, i might end up doing mistakes as well

What coding at work is supposed to look like:
class myclass {
public:
void myfunc;
void.... And so on so forth.

What coding at work actually looks like:
class myclass {
pub--"Hey can get line one? <name> is asking for you."

(20 minutes later)

public:
void myfunc;
vo--"Hey <same name> wants to talk to you again."

Programming doesn't give me gray hair, distractions do.

Been coding for many years. Just submitted my first public commercial app to eBay to get approved for compatibility then going to make some tweaks and send it off to the App Store 😆😬

Junior angular dev, looking for some fun projects to throw on my github. I haven't done any coding for my public github since I started working full time, so it looks like I'm MIA! Want to show off my newly gained skills :)

Anything html/css/boostrap/js/jquery/angular/jasmine/karma/node I'm down for, or if you've got any fun projects related to web development (backend, DB, etc) that's an unfamiliar language I'd probably take a shot at that too!

I built a portfolio before and deployed it to digital ocean and assigned it to my own google purchased .com, but that's the most "impressive" thing I've done so far.

Looking for a recommendation on what I should use to code on my phone.

I own an iPhone and usually spend a lot of time on public transit. I thought that it would be better to spend that time coding or learning something new. I am semi experienced in programming and this would help me get better as well.

Any recommendations on any app (possibly free) that I could download to kinda allow me to code and learn at the same time?