Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

---- Startup RantLife ----

A senior developer joined the team, let's name him Bob, and this guy is really good no doubts about that.
He made suggestions, some improvements, but Bob is always waving his hands and says out loud that some part of the code base is really really bad.
I kept quiet until one day I had to pair with Bob to check a feature. Guess what happened, as usual, Bob clenched his fist and start pointing that this code is super ugly.
So let's check the history of changes and boom, Bob was the main writer.
That moment, I was completely silent, trying not to smile as Bob came up with an excuse, he never admits that he is wrong, now he needs a scapegoat and he starts blaming the process, the planning...
I believe that being humble and saying sorry is a quality that it requires time to develop.
So don't be like Bob, please :)

Just who the fuck from apple thought its a good idea to make the FUCKING SCROLL BAR overlap, the FUCKING PROPERTY ARROWS, everytime i accidentaly hover over it? I cant change shit! I have to wait few seconds every time i accidentaly hover over the scrollbar so i can be able to FUCKING CHANGE the value!

Dear Apple Inc,

Fix your shit! We're paying 100$ a year for what? More bugs and toruture? I didnt sign up for this bullshit! Give us back some real quality products, or just buy the company Jetbrains and let them build the IDE for you instead.

An entire night I've spent on this shit.. preparing wires, soldering them on the motherboard, and finally connecting everything up to current meters, my PC's USB port and a lithium cell from my old Doogee phone that I still had laying around. All in the hopes to get an adb shell. But all in vain.. the turd doesn't even want to boot up. What a fantastic waste of time 😑
(Apologies for the terrible picture quality btw, this tablet's camera is absolute garbage)

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

"We need to reduce the scope of the project, guys... What if we don't make tests? They're taking some time do write, so..."

Yep. Let's compromise the quality and call it scope reduction. It will make wonders to our roadmap 👍

Boss: Have you finished that feature?
Me: Almost there, i'm refactoring some classes...
Boss: What? Refactor? But thisnis a new feature, it does not need refactor! We don't have time for this!
Me: 😵🔫

This is what happen when you care about code quality.

My boyfriend, actually. But I value the human aspect more than the tech genius in fairness. He may be no Linus Torvalds but I don't care and wouldn't change him.

Why him?

He's very kind to less experienced developers and always happy to help them. He teaches them not only how to solve things but how to get un-stuck the next time and what to learn.
His code reviews are inside out, not just a quick scan, he gives a chance to learn and takes one for himself too.
He takes pride in delivering great quality, well thought over code, on time.
He owns his mistakes and isn't afraid to admit when he makes them.
He reads a ton of tech books and always learns something new yet stays humble while discussing things he knows a lot about.
He has a ton of hobbies other than coding which he's good at.

Ah there, yeah whatever I'm a big softie today 😋 he's not on DevRant btw. Also sometimes I want to punch him too, but mainly he's a good guy :)

tl;dr: thanks! :)

I just love this community.
The idea of devRant is great. The emotions, the shared knowledge in each post. Never seen such densely packed quality content in a social media! :D
I enjoy spending my time here, though I do not post that much. Reading just about the life of @linuxxx, @gitpush @alexDeLarge (to name a few) share with us is just wonderful, it makes me happy! :)

I think this post is meant as a thank you, I guess? Just felt like it... hope you guys don't mind having read a non-dev related post.^^'

btw:
@dfox and @trogus, you guys are awesome as fuck!

Stack Overflow. Everyone uses it but everyone seems to hate the community. I very often read about someone getting down voted and they all say the same thing - "I have no idea why".

I have spent a lot of time moderating SO posts, which gave me a lot of reputation and medals. I find it fun to help people and it feels good to give back to the community.

I have asked a bunch of questions and I've never gotten a single down vote, which leads me to believe everyone of you that is constantly getting down voted are doing something wrong. Because the posts I see getting down voted are fucking stupid questions that either lack information or contain too much information.

Example 1:
Server java error

Why is my server not working? I am using Tomcat, port 8080 and I'm getting IOException.

Example 2:
Webpack configuration not working

My webpack is not a working, why?
[entire webpack config]

End examples.

What the fuck are you expecting asking questions like these?? No one gets paid for answering your questions, so the least you can do is write a CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE question. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because there's A LOT of information on how to do it.

People devote hours and hours to helping others on SO, and of course they get fed up with the stupid and lazy questions. That community is not about being nice, it's not about making people feel welcomed, it's about QUALITY OF CONTENT. No one is crying when they find a superb question + answer, right? That's the result of a community not accepting low quality content.

So please, the next time you get a down vote on SO - do not come here whining about it but instead take a look at what you have posted there and ask yourself if it could have held a higher quality.

Thanks!

Fucking hell, that's now the fourth time in a row that I see my clients getting ripped a second asshole by previous developers, this one charged 1500$ for a "python script" that only calls ffmpeg with couple args, claiming tons of shit like the video being e.g. better quality after conversion - even though all it does, is a straight convert from one format to another. (no filters, anything, just a convert) I feel always so terribly bad discovering that shit and them proudly telling me about the "solution" they invested in..

Manager: We will be building a new app. THIS TIME EVERYTHING MUST BE ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, ANYTHING LESS THAN TOP QUALITY WORK WILL BE REJECTED!!

*Not even 2 days into the new project*

Manager: Ok that’s good enough, we can fix it later. Can you go quicker on the next feature? Just sacrifice a bit of quality so we get these tickets closed as fast as possible. I said we can fix it later. Getting tickets closed asap is top priority.

Dev: …

I think having the wrong job can really bring down the quality of life.

My friend has to drive two hours each way to get to and from work. That's four hours wasted commuting.. and his job is service desk agent.
What are the consequences, you ask? He never has a spare second to talk to me, he's quickly developing gray hairs and he has no time awareness.

Having the wrong job is unhealthy and results in a cascade of bad side effects.. When most of your day involves work-related things, that's just wrong. There is no Yin-Yang there. I know because my work life is somewhat balanced.

To me it seems that Software eng has become a „I wanna get rich“ thing..

Too many idiots do it and think they’ll get tons of money..
Not that many new geeks because of that..

Also, I feel like the mentality has switched from quality oriented to shiny oriented..
3/4 of new Software i use contains serious bugs that don’t get fixed because it takes time..

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

I switched to Comic Sans for any internal communication.
Those in delivery/support/sales/HR/emotional crap/professional buzzworders/etc no longer take me seriously and therefore I no longer waste my time with their BS.

If not an improvement in the more materialistic side of the career itself, certainly an improvement in the quality of life.

That moment you realise why you enjoy the dev life again.

It's been a long time since I've had a solid day of coding, just coding..., no meetings, no wild requests, no crazy issues, no data fixing because someone can't type a number correctly, just me, myself and that keyboard going on a field trip of quality coding time again.

Ah, it's a good day to end the week on!

Everyday single day I have to give time for family, personal work and office. Prioritized in that order.

End result : low quality family time, pending personal projects. Office work - well that one is OK I guess cos the time is dedicated.

Solution : made a deal with wife - one day on weekend dedicated for family (she can plan anything she wants) and I will not do any work. Other day dedicated for my personal work/time (no family plans).
Divide weekdays similarly. On family days I checkout at sharp 4pm from office and come home straight spend the rest of the day with family alone. On the other days I stay either at office or go somewhere to work or hangout with dev buddies.
*Wife agrees*

End result: Quality family time. No interruption when coding (a dev would understand the importance of this). More productive work.

Full year of cutting edge delivery on or before time, year end feedback time:

Manager: we r gonna give u lower rating this year because u we're not up to expectations

Me: but what expectations I did not meet

Manager: u completed all tasks before time and with quality and in half time compared to others...but unlike others u didn't slog...u should have slogged...

Me: fuck u...!! I resign!

devRant on a HoloLens!

The HoloLens is really cool, I was allowed to use it after a short hackathon. I am still surprised, but it works great and the concept feels natural after a short moment - web browsing is not recommended as no website is optimized for mixed reality (yet?).

Sorry for the low quality photo (it is not the compression algorithm's fault this time).

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

DuckDuckGo SUCKS!

I mean, I like the concept. The private, highly customizable search engine is what we all need.

But if 4/5 times I have to use 'g!' just to find some really basic stuff, because the results are incorrect or point to low quality content then what's the point of using it in the first place?! It's really frustrating especially if I try to find something in Polish or Dutch, but even in English most of the time the search results sucks!

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.

Quality takes time.

Hey guys, I'm here to upvote quality content. I don't have much to rant, so take my support!

Been lurking for quite some time now =)

So.... We spend most our lives learning languages and methodologies and best practices and all that crap while depriving ourselves of sleep because the rules said if we did that we'd make something cool and have fun doing it...

But then *any company here* comes along and says make this shitty feature in *arbitrary time here* for our stupid *product here*.
You do it working overtime and sacrificing quality to have the client say afterwards that he wants something different (from his own specs).

And then the circle repeats...

I should consider a different profession...
Hey plants don't speak... Maybe I'll be a gardener!
Clip here clip there - done. I'll be a happy fucking script

I worked someplace once that fired a person for lack of quality output. Before that he sued the company over a labor dispute. After they fired him he went and founded his own business. A year later the company decided to recycle his old laptop to another developer and discovered the source code and business prospectus on it. The company took it to court and said it was actually their business because it was created on its own equipment and the time stamps confirm during business hours also. Courts agreed and they got possession of his business and then fired him again.

Hello everyone,
I am a french student and I was wondering if college sucks everywhere ...
This is my third college year and I have the feeling that I am wasting my time.

I am in a quite good engineering school but most of the programming courses suck because «teachers» are clueless about the course that they give.

I am not here to tell that «I am better than them blabla» but I just wanted to know if the quality of education has slightly dropped not only in France.

I am really interested in your opinion, feel free to debate in the comments :)

Our CEO suddenly wanted to work with an outsourcing company to build the product. On one of the "sale" meetings I asked a guy from that company:
- Can we interview developers before they join our project?
- Our company is responsible for the quality of the service we provide, - the guy replied
- What are you going to charge us for?
- For all the hours developers worked
- So your service is developer hours, and we'll be obligated to pay for all the hours they worked regardless the code quality or the performance, right?

So it seems outsourcing company is only responsible for their time sheets to correspond to real hours worked? :-)

We call such a companies in Ukraine - a galley

Do you still store your music files locally?

I like owning my music files on my storage.

Disadvantages:
Storage space
Time spent organising metadata

Advantages:
Savour the quality
Accessible

I don't have an internet access all the time unless I'm home. I feel left behind seeing everyone just streaming music.

A) Create something that works, is fast, minimum bugs, have edge cases covered, nice testes, clean code. Cool, you did your job. END.

B) Create something shitty with bugs, performance issues, non or poor test coverage, mess code, etc. Cool, you did you job. But...

Next week you reduced bugs by 50%. Wow, you're rockstar.

Another week you improved performance by 15%. Again, you're the hero.

2 weeks later, you reached 85% test coverage. Management is so happy that almost got orgasm.

"A" took 3 months, "B" took 3 months plus few months of fixes. The only time where B was winning was first 4 weeks, where A was carefully building it's architecture and quality.

Yet B is seemed more successful.

This industry is F****d Up beyond my understanding.

1. Success in supporting my wife for her personal goals

2. Quality time with my family, especially with my daughter

3. Maintain my current brain abilities

If you're a manager that cuts on hardware quality — listen.

When you die, I will contain your soul into the closed cube made of cheap whining SMD coils. You'll be there forever unable to end your suffering and will forever hear that coil whine until the end of time.

I forged a katana once, under the supervision of a swordsmith. Nothing super special like damascus patterning or anything, but the cutting edge was pretty sharp.

Ugh sorry, lame word jokes.

In terms of software...

Microsoft Office Ribbon (cutting edge at the time, lol). Only as a maintenance drone on a bunch of manual search-and-replace work and merge conflict resolving.

Ariane 6 family of rockets (Welding X-rays and other DICOM quality assurance).

Software for continuous flow chemistry, developing microfluidic PCBs to perform Elisa immunology assays during the Mexican flu outbreak. Idea was to eliminate the need for microplates, expensive robots, microwell washers, etc — just have blood plasma, enzymecoated nanoparticles, antigen, conjugated detection reagents and substrates flowing programmatically through a PCB with a spectrophotometer built in.

Its all fun and games until your malfunctioning software costs people their lives - if you're just starting out as a dev or in the "ain't nobody got time for writing tests" camp, I highly recommend you to lookup and read about the Therac-25 incidents during the 80s.

Even if you're not working on a life-critical/mission-critical application, the realization of the impact that us devs can have on the society can push you to become a better developer producing quality software...

My current project is a fucking nightmare.

It started in 2007, using a solution developed by an Indian company due to outsourcing (aka low-quality code).

It's running on Java 7 on the back-end and its front-end side is pure Javascript files. There are thousands of little .js files everywhere, no documentation, no comments, differents coding styles, outdated API that were already outdated at the time, mixed oop and procedural.
Not even when I started coding, I wrote something so horrible.

Yo, it's a clusterfuck and I just wanna get drunk.

Switched jobs one month ago.

Used to work overtime on complex features, every engineer was 10x, learned a bunch, worked my ass of everyday. Switch due to overtime and because I wanted more personal time.

Anyways, at the new job I’ve completed two tickets in a month, code is shit, no one cares about the quality, scalability, etc. I’m payed 2x more and I currently work max 3 hours a day. Feels weird AF. I guess I got what I wanted, but didn’t know back then that professionally I’m going to degrade. Didn’t happen yet, but I can see that in the future.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Lots of oof in one image.

I like how they had the audacity to say (and I fucking quote): "this is good news!"

I don't like to complain about sites generating revenue. I understand it is important and I even feel morally obligated not to use an adblocker. But all I will say is that the site has sustained itself for a very long time without the use of poor-quality and unrelated ads, and this feels like a lot more of a money grab than something the site actually requires.

Anyways, happy to see a -400 score on it. And I guess I can't wait to get Amazon ads on SO.

So working on the Android for work, and go to add in images for parts of the app. I add in images and load the app up and it crashes, I thought hmm maybe I missed something for the imageview.

The exception was an out of memory exception and from looks of it, it exceeded my phone memory by quite a bit (OnePlus 3 has 8gb LOL), I was stumped since I don't typically run into this.

Turns out this time around it wasn't my fault lol, I had some images outsourced to a company our company uses for doing design work and well Android doesn't like 2000 x 2000 super high quality for logos.

I mean sure it's good it's high quality but to have 3 images eat up a lot of memory (I assume my phone won't allocate all 8gb to one app lol).

Most tedious part of my day...

While meetings are boring and awful and all, it's probably spinup times for me. Each and every change requires a minimum of 35 seconds of spinup to test. If i'm testing something with mailers or other daemons, that increases to easily 90+ seconds (plus the worker thread pickup times).

It's not enough time to do anything useful, and more than enough time to lose my focus. It turns every task into boring, tedious struggle. It's awful.

Apart from my coworkers, this is the single worst part about my job. (Okay, the awful code quality totally pushes this to third place.)

I've thought of couple of good outcomes of Apple removing the headphone jack:

1. Wireless headphones will be developed much more

2. They will be available for better prices as competitors starts to compete. At this time most of the wireless headphones are quite expensive.

3. Quality over wireless will now become a priority.

But I don't support this decision and will stick with my Xperia Z5.

The weekend is here!!!
Time to go out and have fun!!!

Nah just joking. Time to write some quality code after cleaning our company's backend (pun definitely intended) all week!

The effect of the scoring system is interesting.

On Facebook, where I usually spend most of my social media time, I have been training myself to NOT comment unless I really wanna engage, because I have an IRL habit of just talking shit just to hear myself speak that bleeds into my Facebook engagement, which is a character flaw I’m trying to change.

On here though, I will see something I wouldn’t normally respond to and I’ll comment cause I want those ++s.

BUT the quality of my comments on here are generally way “better” (more meaningful, usually kinder, etc) than my FB comments, obvi because I want those ++s and on Facebook I can be as dumb and mean as I want without having “consequences” aside from the obvious social consequences of people thinking I’m an asshole...but on here it kinda forces me to be more mindful of how I’m engaging with people

To anyone asking for tips and tricks to start programming or become good at it, here is your ultimate golden advice: learn how to google and stop asking stupid questions like this before doing a quick research.

Reasons why:

1. You will most likely to learn better if you do your own research before asking for help. Even if you can't solve problem, you will be better and better at googling over time.
2. It is instant source of information. No need to wait for response (except response from server of course).
3. It takes only YOUR time.
4. Much more possible solutions/answers to your problems/questions.
5. Your quality of life will be improved over time. Not only your dev life but your daily life too.

So a little story about finding your way. I worked at an IoT software firm, very well established. I had a hard time with the on boarding process due to some factors, and I must have lagged behind their mental schedule for my growth. It was clear nonetheless that I was a quality coder and had made some friends there.

It wasn’t enough for the ensuing corporate bullying. It went by and I took it. I became the yes man just so I don’t frustrate anyone enough to turn away my ask for help. This made things worse and before long, I a grown man went to visit my mum and all but cry at how small I felt, after all my hard work getting to the company.

I felt sick with failure but I knew I couldn’t go back. I emailed my resignation and dropped off my company laptop.

4 months later I am working at a medical startup with my own projects, that I have 100% control over. And the quality of my work and ethic is pleasing upper management in all the right ways. I’ve never been happier, and there are barely any perks on paper. No free lunches on Thursdays or discounts at the local high street. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life because I said NO to feeling or being treated any less than I worked and progressed to be.

Don’t let other people stop your potential for their own ego, or any other reason. 😊

It seems like there are more lower-quality or duplicate comments on rants these days.

Please, save me some time and show a little respect for members of the community by ++ the comment you agree with instead of adding a nearly identical comment and tagging the commenter.

Additionally, comments like '@commenter 😂' when the great comment is still at +0 generally don't add to the discussion and should probably be downvoted.

Comment if you think you can add something, not just because you saw it.

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

Everyone is on their vacation and I am in good mood so time to refactor some 3 year old frontend, angular, javascript code. After 5 minutes of looking, some great quality of code snippet on the image below.

1. Apply to as mant jobs as possible daily on dice/linkedin/indeed
using keyword resumes customized by scrapping

2. Filter out low-effort crap companies and filter out recruiters.

3. Post "dice/indeed/linkedin daily decrapified."

Tada! Fewer time-wasters during the job hunt.

4. Bonus: turn into a search engine.

5. Daily double round: turn crap listings and quality listings into AI training sets. Incorporate into search engine.

If industry can use bullshit hiring filters, we can use application filters!

You know your a dev when quality time with the kids is sitting them on your lap and letting them watch Netflix on one monitor while you program on the other.

The feeling when random dudes downvote a question, because a guy who finally earned some points on SO dared to format the code with `<code>`<br> He pasted code, log, even explained a little bit and ~500 point guy even flags it like _unclear_ although there's clearly visible import error.

I mean... as an answerer or moderator, I'd be damn ashamed for such behavior! I have absolutely no problem kick a person with words + explanation in my answer or comment, so that (s)he remembers to ask better questions and feels bad about that, because nooby questions are already answered so many times there.

But to downvote because of formatting even if you have a permission to edit and a flag for low quality or because you can't read ~40 lines of log makes you just a retard and hurt the whole remaining community of guys like me who find time to sit there and answer questions to help another people.

I guess I've just got the ideal dev job. Working from home, with nice people in my team and enough time to deliver quality work.

> asks for better pay
> starts trying to evaluate the quality of our efforts
> complains about doing things that are not good in the long run
> spends time mastering best practices
> unemployed

I carry the same mindset as an aspiring programmer as I did when I was a music major. There were times I practice for hours and got very little out of it in terms of quality (because I wasn't interested, focused or willing) and then there were times I practiced for 20 mins and really made progress on the piece. So I always keep that in mind to save me time and to produce better code overall.

So a non programmer friend of mine needed an in house time tracking tool and found one on codecanyon. He bought it for 40$ and asked me if I could provide him some Webspace to host it until they deploy it in house. I said yes and took a look at the code as some stuff wasn't really working. All I can say is "wtf is that pile of crap". Nothing works, it looks like it's written by a first grader and it's UI looks like it was assembled by a chimp (well actually I think chimpanzees could make a better UI). Now I am interested the progress of rewriting that tool for him and I am almost done with all functions that thing should have and even more after 6 hours. I wonder if all stuff on codecanyon has the same quality and if, I am considering this as bonus income...

End user when criticizing a developer for 'taking long' to create something of value from scratch:
(4 hours later): "What's taking you so damn long? Are you retarded?"

Oh I don't know, maybe I have to make sure that tests in my code run well, maybe I have to evaluate everything to meet the custom satisfactions of the user for his ever-so-custom requirements and I also have to make sure I discard what they don't like? And maybe it takes time to deliver a quality product, and so on?
Or would you prefer I deliver an untested product that I didn't bother to think about and I haven't bothered to make sure it matches with their requirements?

What end users don't understand is the involvement in a quality product.

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

I am a senior Android dev, and I have an old colleague (iOS senior dev). We work on the same project, but in every estimation session he pushes a lot on the lower side: he estimates 4h a task that normally takes 6h or 8h, and the reason is that he has no social life. Right after work he starts working again from home (I can see all his commits), he also works almost entire weekends. I would say he works as average 12/13 h per day.
I don t want to work extra time (unpayed).
About him, it is his life, so I don t care...but at the same time this makes me pressure. I care a lot about quality of code, and I don t want to sacrifice it just for catching up. Most of the people in the team know that he works a lot extra time.

How would you handle this?

Fuck unreasonable deadlines. Just do your stuff as if you have the time of the world. Stop compromising the quality of your work and things are going to be done when they're done. Good quality stuff that's worth the wait.

I started to tell this to myself this week. For months now I took the bait that everything is urgent. And whatever crap management want has to be done yesterday. But.... Well... They pushed it too effing far.

Redo this module that took the former team about six months to finish. You have 10 days.

Well... What? Everyone is saying yes?... Everyone going full code monkey making no progress?

This is the moment I stop compromising and stop listening to your suggestions. I am going to do what I know how to do, the way I know it works, and I will not cut one corner based off your suggestions. I'm sorry, I've been dealing with this shit for too long already, and I don't want to suffer the consequences of degrading the quality of what I write anymore.

I've taken a year's break from university to work on projects using various languages. For the first half, I've been trying to produce as much as possible. Now, I'm taking my time and producing less. I've gotta say, I'm enjoying it far more now. I feel like I'm learning more and producing better quality code.

A beautiful gem ticket from a manager today:

Title: "Check Stripe "Snippet APK" that might help for integration into the app to track pricing easily."

Alright, it's very clear this particular individual has no idea what they are talking about, but, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and read the ticket description!

Description: "I think stripe offers some sort of snippet that can be implemented into the app similar to FB pixel. (I could be wrong here..) let’s briefly check this, if it’s of value for our A/B-Tests → e.g. if it makes your life easier = good otherwise it’s not important."

...

I might as well replace the management team with GPT-3 at this point.

Or even just a simple Markov chain; that'd probably be more accurate if you want to match the ticket quality more exactly of this ABSOLUTE PILE OF HORSESHIT WASTE OF TIME I GET FED EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY.

🤡

Step 1. Learn to code .
Step 2. Exchange code for money.
Step 3. Exchange money for car, soap & a clean shirt.
Step 4. Profit.
[GOTO: Step #1]

Lol. OK on a serious note coding improved my love life, it drastically reduced the frequency of dates - but dramatically improved the quality and duration of my relationships.
I used to believe that anyone/thing had the potential to be great - and (like me) all they needed was a little time to seize an opportunity.
This essentially meant there were no deal breakers and I spent a lot of time giving people benefit of the doubt and investing a lot of time & effort supporting and trying to build on aspirations that would turn out to simply be fantasies I was indulging.

I still idealistically believe that everything/one has infinite potential - only now I know which problems are worth solving, which are purely for fun or a thought experiment and which should immediately be thrown out and refactored.

All the ambition in the world is void without drive.

I was eating my oats happily when, suddenly, Boss called because clients complained data duplication in reports, and asked why I removed DISTINCT in the query. So, I stopped eating and obliged to answer the call because I so loved my work :) <3

How is it my fault now, when the QA just told me to make the data transparent and to not display them distinctly by name?

Been 122 days since my last post, since then I have been working on a game engine on Vala using SDL2 in my free time (Lol I have none)

Decided to put that on ice or just work on it when drunk (very common occurrence) and teaching myself C while working on a game or game engine, hopefully will have some quality rants inbound!

[Half question / half rant]

Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?

Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.

Fucking cant solve productivity problem. Since I was working as programmer, about 8-9 years experience, constant complaints about my productivity and some jobs even fired me for this. Only one job did not complain and I worked in it longest time but still I was worrying very often about my productivity. It is fucking annoying. Why others are productive and I am not. How the fuck to find biggest bottlenecks to know which to work on.
I know I am not knowing technology perfectly, and from time to time I get stuck and so I ask other people help, or somehow manage to find solution myself but it takes more time. But dont know if that is the biggest issue. Should I intecify my learning? I am regularly studying, and working with symfony about 2 years, so I think I should know enough to be productive even with those strugles from time to time. But maybe they are too often?
I have listened book "deep work" and basic thing I think from this is - to minimize disctractions and learn to focus very well. But to minimize like in this book, I should work alone in my room. And even then I would like each hour for few minutes to read some new or smth, which this book says is bad, but a lot of people do that and they somehow get away with it. Plus if I work alone in my room, my social skills might get worse, and we all need social skills, even programmers.
I so envy to others who know how to be productive. I would hate if the only thing to be more productive is to reduce quality of the code, make more bugs. THats fucking cheating system.

I've found a job as a junior developer several months ago, but I really want to find another job...

I know, my knowledge and skills aren't superior yet, but I am tired of that feeling of being useless.. I constantly self-educate myself after work and university, but still, I often need to ask co-workers "where's this form?", "wtf is that", "how do I access this"... Plus, their projects are HUGE, but no matter how big the project is, there are 2 to 4 people working on each at a time. And 1 person may work on 2-3 projects. And we are usually late for deadlines :/

Also code quality is meh..
Me: Why do we implement it here?
Co-worker: oh, we don't actually use it, it's just to hide warnings and pass the test.

Holy shit, wtf, I've spent half day trying to figure out wtf is this and why is it not working :/

If you want developers to track of their hours (for grants etc) then that is fine.

If you require them in a to be in a markdown file in a repository then you are fucking up.

If you won’t pay for any quality time tracking software for your developer then you are an idiot!

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Building an interface for a client between industrial power quality meters and a database that serves a webapp of data.

Client had heard of a way of sending data between meter and raspberry. From some manager in a big firm.

Currently we where using modus to connect the meter to a raspberry. This method was tested and proofen to work. Both devices could talk to each other in modbus.

Client kept demaning to use mbus, and was nog listening to any reason because the firm suggested it. In the end we end up going modbus to mbus to send it to the raspberry. There the mbus was converted back modbus. Because the meter could not communicate in mbus.

Really weird experience to program something so useless. But protesting about it was going nowhere and taking more time than the changes would take to implant.

The best kinds of comments:

/**
Gets user CC info datas.
*/
public Object getUserCCInfoDatas() {}

If you really want to outdo yourself:

/**
Gets user CC info datas.
@param someshit Outdated docs ftw
*/
public Object getUserCCInfoDatas(String unrelatedToDocAbove) {}

Honestly, no documentation is better in some cases. At least I can't be angry about their shitty quality... And they don't waste my time.

So I got this new job as Java developer, the people are really great but is the kind of companies that only takes care for fast results and not for code quality.

Because this I have to deal with libraries updated 4 years ago, classes with 8000 lines, methods with 500 lines, a WHOLE lot of work arounds because there is no time to really fix the issue unless it affects directly the customer (something not working or being really slow) aaand we use fucking svn.

Some of this practice's they know and encourage it (+1000 lines classes for example) and every time I try to talk about good practices in the code everyone seems so interested but there is always no time.

Sooo I will stay here for at least two years, I hope I can make a change for good in their code smells.

I've been a Macbook user for over a decade, after the initial disappointment of the 2016 MacBook Pro release I decided to move to a PC, against my better judgement I decided to buy a new Dell XPS 15, after reading all the reviews praising it's build quality and performance + it seems to have good hardware for Linux compatibility.
Soo much regret, I couldn't be more disappointed, it's such a piece of shit, I admit I probably got a bad egg, but dealing with Dell support is like pulling hairs from my testicle sack. If I have to pay an extra $500-$1000 on my next laptop for an "Apple Tax" to get a product that has been through proper quality control and has awsome customer service so be it, last time I try something new.
BTW I'm not a PC hater, I just wish more companies made high quality products.

I take this chance to post my setup while spending some quality time with the pi!

I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.

So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.

Bottom up approach rather than top down

(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)

Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.

As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.

I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.

I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.

I'm a junior dev, been on placement a year.

I get tasks done mostly on time, my pull requests are merged, yet I still feel like what I'm writing is seriously under quality.

What point will I stop writing code that isn't good enough to not be stressed about? 😷

A client asked for a tool for his website. So I built it for him and he was satisfied with the thing, cause it did what it should. Nevertheless I was not, because it kind of had a messy backend. I made it working and charged my time. Now I am wondering if I should rebuild the thing to satisfy my code quality for free, or just keep that thing as ugly as it is....

What your opinion on this?

!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?

So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.

Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.

Last week I received an invitation to lead the development of a e-commerce redesign, replatforming and data migration. I was excited to work on it, and started the analysis and planning, glad to spend time focusing on quality. But Murphy's law is never asleep - this Monday, I was asked to speed things up and reduce a 4 month project to 1 week.

When I was about 10, I used to read these magazines with code listings for programs, and the only things I really understood were these text adventures that I imagined to be of Zork-like quality (gasp!). In reality, it was more like the choose-your-own adventure books of the time (which were actually pretty cool, and had pretty tight memory management). At one time, on a vacation somewhere in the eighties, I got tired of playing in the river with my friends and instead opted to continue writing lines of BASIC in a little paper notebook, inside my parents' car (at 34 degrees C), trying to perfect a storyline about my little brother and his pet dog he got for his most recent birthday, fighting the cat empire etcetera etcetera. Weird looks, good times.

For the first time apart from Data Structures and Algorithms, there was a Machine Coding round where they asked me to create a small app using any language without data persistence or GUI, to see my code designing ability, LLD, code quality, whether I can implement OOP and write modular code and to see how extensible my code will be.

I did well.

Only company that I really "hate" is Abstergo haha.

All others have their up and downsides I guess....

Microsoft:
+ Xbox One
- Windows

Apple:
+ iPad Mini (don't know any company that produces such high quality but very small tablets... Therefore I still use my ~6 years old iPad Mini 1. (The battery life is insane! After all this time it still lasts about 6-7 hours!)
- The new iPhones. No innovation. Just making money.

Samsung:
+ TVs
- Smartphones (a few crashes here and there, kinda ugly, explosions!)

LG:
+ TVs (webOS is the shit!)
- Heard the Smartphones suck, not sure

And so on....

Working on codebase of a 20+ year old system that the company I work for bought five years ago and in that time there’s been no refactoring, no security updates, no attempt to create automated testing (there is none), new features have just been built on the codebase with no regard for quality and it’s just spun into the horror cesspool that it is today.

I joined one year ago and I’m slowly refactoring the codebase and updating it to get it to a more modern codebase, cleaner code, faster load times and creating a ton of dev documentation so the devs in India can start getting into best practices and start producing quality code.

It is incredible how Google got big with good webdesign and now manages to build the shittiest frontends.

It's not enough that YouTube is super slow and breaks every other time I use the "back" button in the browser. When it only forgot my language & theme settings every couple of months that was still too high quality for Google's dogshit standards, so now they made another downgrade: Whenever I set another language it immediately resets it to the language Google thinks I should speak, and at the same time resets the region to where Google thinks I live. Oh, and I have to disable autoplay for every video individually now cause who the fuck uses cookies nowadays right?

Do they also change the language if I travel to another country because those fucks never leave Silicon Valley and can't comprehend that concept?

Google is the Microsoft of web design.

Anyone here making big bucks working for a small company? I've interned at startups and worked full time for fortune 500's, but I'm considering looking at smaller companies in the future just because the corporate environment kind of burns me out. What's it like being a senior level developer for a smaller company? Is the money typically there? And in your experience, what about quality and expectation of work? I would love to have some more say and passion into what I'm building and take home a big chunk of what a business earns but I don't know how realistic that is.

I'd also like to start my own e-commerce company but as a web developer with 0 business / marketing experience that seems far off lol

Took a chance at telling my bosses how burned out I am and had a really great discussion with them.

Turns out they want me to lead the front end team, because I'm good at it and can make them do higher quality work. Agreed with me that there's something wrong with the code if you have to use a different IDE lmao.

And I can use my 30+ days of sick leave (which I've never used because I don't get sick) to take time off when I need to. Burn out is a disease.

Not all bosses are shitty.

> do you feel sorry for freelancing contractors
> whose previous client abandoned them
> they ask you to help them fix some trivial bugs in the shitty code
> you believe you can change the world by going overboard by also improving the code quality, along with fixing the bugs
> initialize an empty file where you'll translate the shitty code into a more organized one
> start creating variables and generic functions which can be used in a modular and organized fashion
> meticulously document the first function you write
> realize this is not worth your time
> insert some glue code into the original code which fixes the trivial bugs
> glue code has hard coded values so it adds to the shittiness of the code
> submit the work
> get $$$

A lot of people have some very unrealistic expectations when it comes to cheap technology. You just can not expect to pay bottom price and get high quality results at the same time...

I'm so sick and tired of people feeling threatened when improving upon their shitty code! I'm here to do a job and I enjoy my profession.

Don't take that away from me by wasting my time making me say every fucking time that I come from a good place and that I just want to provide a better solution AND not create fucking mess that will have to be rewritten when some ninja bugs occur because of completely unmaintainable crap nobody can understand. Holy shit!

I couldn't care less if you're 10 years in the company. I see that all the good devs left after dealing with your shit every God damn day.

I'm not here to deal with your insecurities and couldn't care less about pointing fingers! I just wanna do better and not write same level of quality over and over again!

You're not getting bonus points from me by sitting on your ass all day and half-assing everything you do with some lame ass excuse.

So no LGTM from me when it's utter error prone shit!

So if you don't wanna help, just get the fuck outta my way and don't waste my time! Jeeez

I too got my $1 unix sticker pack (thank you very much whoever posted this by the way) and thought posting a picture of them would be redundant
First thing when I brought them to work to show them or to my colleagues I stepped out of my car and they all fell to the soaking wet ground (it was pouring down at the time)
Luckily they're of very high quality and still intact 😊

My colleague told me today that companies with shit code quality, complete chaos, no tests of QA of any kind, and poor security practices still make loads of money and are extremely successful so it's all a waste of time.

I detest this idea and I refuse to work like that anymore. But I also think he's right :(

Remember, the more "cutting edge" and "thousands of clients" a company has is inversely related to the quality of documentation they have on their APIs and software solutions.

I don't give a fuck about your pretty examples, show me which FIELDS can take which VALUES. It's that simple. Instead, I'm wasting your company's and my own time by spamming support for what should be basic questions clearly outlined in the documentation.

Don't you just love customers?

It al began when they showed us the flyers they were printing for their new products, an some one at our company who doesn't work here anymore had the brilliant idea of copying it to their webshop, as a fucking gimmick... Ooohh man the customer didn't seem to understand it was only visually

They wanted the 3d layering effect to be dynamic, so each product would have its own with custom colours

So it was made

A few weeks later they didn't want the informational text, they wanted links to each product that the layer uses

Sounded like logical so it was made

Again some time later, they noticed that the layers were not textured, but just plain

I argued against it because it would add unnecessary loading time for some 300 by 400 px element but they insisted

So they got what they wanted

A few days later they said that the textures were of low quality, and that we had to create ones with higher quality

Again our management said, yes

We made ~ twice the size of the element in image pixels to create a higher definition image

Then the customer wanted that the layers should change based on some selection menu above it

(At this point we realized that it would no longer be just a fun little gimmick)

So we tried to refactor/rebuild it to remove most if not all the hacks we did just to make the customer happy, that took too long for them (the customer) so we had to revert back to the hacked together version because otherwise we would not be done on time (commanded by management)

But again, we ... I say 'we' as in the company but realistically I've been the only one who has worked on the fucking abomination

But I digress...

A few stupid requests later, some layer images are almost fully transparent PNG images that are almost 1mb in Filesize each (some products have 5 or even more layers) and the god damn thing now has to account for optional layers...

I AM FUCKING SPENT... I'VE JUST CAME BACK FROM VACATION BUT I ALREADY NEED IT AGAIN... FUCKING WORKING 60 HOURS A WEEK JUST TO KEEP ONE CUSTOMER HAPPY WHILE OTHER PROJECTS BREATH ON MY NECK

Everyone talks about quality, but they don't know what it means/ don't want to invest the time to do things right.

Have few close friends, not a swarm of people.
Saves time.
And keeps strong bonds with people that really matter.
Spending some "quality social time" is more valuable than shitload hours of fake fuckery with dumbfucks.
Just my opinion.

!rant

I've always been wondering why do tech companies need everyone to have a strong grasp of algos and data structures?

I've been coding most of my life but didn't get a CS degree so ended up in IT but I kind of want to get into a tech company as my thinking is the quality of code much higher (I spend a lot of time cleaning up other people's code and prod issues over the years...), I've been learning Algo/DS but when I see those technical questions on CareerCup, I go WTF.... it's this the kind of problems you guys do every day?

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

Discord...

Okay, I have a lot to rant about discord, but today, exceptionally, to the point.

I have my dedicated server. It has uptime last 3 years better than 99,99% (was down 15ish minutes for maintainance and RAM upgrade and like 10 minutes down becouse hoster's generators failed to trigger when there was outage)

This year it was up 24/7/365.

Why am I saying it?
Well, my TS3 server is up 100% of time this year. Yet still everyone moves to discord and suffers brutal audio quality and audio lags, and outages like right now. Its not first time this year and recently discord was acting up before. Today they scored bigger downtime than my dedi server (thats not redundant, not distributed nor any fancy "uptime helpers") last 3 years.

Why the fuck people prefer discord to ts3 other that it allows to upload images more conviniently? Okay, it looks nicer, and is like 10 times heavier on machine, but other than that? Its beyond me.

E: fix typo
E2: fix typo

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.

I spent about an hour writing my own password generator at work... (And probably my item password safe) because my company doesn't allow using Keepass...

But require super complex passwords... That need to be exactly 8 characters...

And they expect us to somehow think of and remember them... And change it every 6 months....

As a developer, isn't it a given that if we can't have something, we'll just build one ourselves... But one that is lower quality since it is adhoc and with by a single dev... That doesn't have time or the experience of a domain expert...

They also blocked GitHub/Sourceforge so I can't just download from my own repo... And basically need to do it on company time... For better or worse.

Fuck,

I've been charging everything with the oculus quest 2 charger because it's very powerful but it just blew up my headphones. I did this often before but this time was a whole night.

I hope I can still get this great headphones, it had such good volume & bass. It's the cheapest Fresh & Rebel but the sound quality and battery is great

Was going through old photos from university time and...I present to you the result of deadline + lack of sleep + boredom + shitty university project because somebody decided that CS folks needed to learn webdev in old ASP.NET.

Yes that is one query. I wrote the entire thing out as a string in my C# program in one go and tested it by running it from the program. Must've worked properly because I got them grades so eh. I recall I had one nested seven levels too (this is just 5) but I can't find a photo of it. These two queries did all the business logic. Yeah.

Apologies for the poor quality photo of the screen, I don't have the code so no screenshot, this is just from my photos archive

I cancelled prime a few months ago so when I was doing BF shopping on Amazon yesterday, delivery is now 1wk instead of 2-days.

And shipping apparently is $9 if you don't meet the $25 minimum and manually select free shipping; I remember it was $6 before...

So a few thoughts I had:

1. Amazon really must need the Prime memberships to cover all the shipping costs since it is now a pain in the ass to get free shipping on the checkout page.

2. Americans really want instant gratification? Waiting a week is that painful?

In contrast, stuff from China take about a month but are much cheaper

3. The only thing that's worth buying via Amazon now is electronics and stuff that are fragile... And food that's on sale because they have to uphold quality

4. Lucky for me, I get 1 week shipping, I have more time to cancel orders... Which is what I actually did

I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm

There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.

So in our last retros some of my colleagues suggested to (forced) limit the number of lines per method in order to "maximize our code quality".

In the one hand I can see the benefits of this, such as easier testability when having more sperate testable blocks of logic.

But on the other side their code contains lots of such one or two lines private methods which get most of the cases not more than one time called. (And which I then can't even test separately)

I don't understand how this should help...
Is this really a thing? Am I just not "clean" enough?
(it's c# btw)

Following my first rant, my boss had the brilliant idea of running the old and the new architecture in parallel. I had advised that it won’t be ideal since the same Scala code was ingesting into 2 different Kinesis streams and one was running an old KCL written in Java where as other was consumed by a Firehose delivery stream(eventually we will be ingesting it into Firehose directly). I had told few manual + automated tests on Code as well as from a functionality of the new architecture and a set of tests for checking the integration of the new Producer code with Consumer.

The statement I got from my boss was “This is the test, we test it on production in parallel”. My boss had a brilliant idea to fucking test the new code on the production directly but running them in parallel without accounting for undefined behaviour it might cause in the current production system. I mean my boss should get a Nobel peace prize for shattering our mental peace.

Anywho, we started the deployment today at 5AM in the morning. I had all the aws services deployed. Was just waiting to deploy the new Collector code which we did at 5AM. Immediately after 5 minutes the system went bonkers, there was fire, blood, demons and I was smoking a cigarette with the biggest “I told you so smile” on my face. I’ve just written an email to my boss and have told him calmly that “Listen motherfucker, 90 percent of the software companies aren’t idiots to focus on testing and quality. We need to start spending time on testing and quality else we’ll again be in the same soup after few weeks again”.waiting for his reply

The cool feeling when you see your static analyzer that compare previous version and future release and code quality is improved.

At the same time the bad feeling because you was the same dev that made the previous version.

Reading google revies of hospitals is one of my pet peeves. Like it is certainly not an indication to the hospitals quality. As there are mostly people reviewing who had a bad experience. Also a lot of hysterical people who are like: "Walked into the ER with minor headache. Was appalled at the wait time and left. Never going back there again. Worst service everrrr" or "The service woman at the front desk could neither give me a precise diagnosis nor where I had to go to get my second lobotomy."

Lol so we had a meeting where basically the entire dev team got shat on for everything always taking too long... Now, I know a .lot of us suck at estimates but if it's all the time then do you think maybe we're not getting the best quality info to wok from?

Then they revised the WFH policy to 3 days a week in office. AND got pissy about the hours.

so I ask you all what are you hours?

VNC, RDP, X11 Forwarding, WTF.

There is not a single good product to "stream" a linux desktop to a different machine without being logged in in "parallel".

They are all complicated and/or suck big time in quality.

I haven't had an actual burnout ever since I started programming 6 years ago, maybe duo to the fact that I don't accept more than 2 projects at the same time, and I request a minimum deadline of 1 month for any project.

that said, I had to offer the clients something in compensation, basically lower prices and higher quality applications.

so i guess the more you give the more you earn?

Working for a large client converting paper forms to the web. Stated goals, simplify data entry for clients, improve data quality, reduce resourcing in backend human processing.

We met to review prototype and discuss workflow questions. Crazy deadlines, with the usual changing scope creep.

We start to point out the need for data validation, to shorten # of questions based on answers.

Business says no. All forms should be submittable regardless of what user enters, don’t put validations in because all that warning messaging confuses them and takes up more time.

Web form should behave like the paper copy....

Welcome to 1975!!! This is why 2018 won’t be like 2018...

Over the last few years I started to change my mind about Microsoft, thinking that now it's a different company, caring about its customers more than money, focusing on quality to wipe away their bad reputation.

But no, this week I was proven wrong. I had to use one of the Microsoft products (SharePoint) and all I have to say is: same old shit.

Slow, gives errors at random times, often does not save changes. The online editor has been completely broken for two days now. Never wasted so much time before on such a piece of crap.

Fuck you Microsoft, I guess it's not time for us to meet again.

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

Customer: The quality of the software you’re delivering is going down
Me: That’s because we’re developers, support, and spend all day on meetings without mentioning that deadlines are defined by you, not the technical team
Project Manager: I have added more members to the team so you can deliver faster
Me: That’s just slowing us down because this inherited code is shit, there’s no documentation and we’re always in a rush, without time for a proper ramp up
Customer: *throws money to our faces* I’ll remove two weeks to this delivery so we can test it better
Me: …

I am still confused why people treat testing as secondary position? Tester are paid less and they hire lower quality engineers. I think testing is as important as any other phase of development, like design or implementation. . . and yeah we do testing of our own code. The only thing I can do in my case is to see that people who change my code may not break basic functionalities. And again about edge cases, try to handle some other left to be seen in production( those which I could not think of due to lack of time) I take care not to leave edge case but sometime cannot do it. I just hope people realise the worth of testing.

I have this impression that non-devs have this idea that you can ask for a developer to learn and implement a new technology with the same ease as ordering a Happy Meal.

Oh, you want me to learn a completely new technology, write very high quality, bug-minimal code, test it, document it, in a matter of hours?! Maybe senior devs can do this, but for me, it's like asking me to build software for NASA and guaranteeing it will work wonderfully without being given the time to thoroughly test it, design it or even think about it. Wooh, just code this as fast as possible and to industry standards quality!

Anyway... just another frustration.

It needs to be outright illegal for laptops to have fewer than four USB ports.

If the purpose of law is to improve the quality of life, why not outlaw the time-consuming annoyance of laptops with few USB ports?

The purpose of laptops is portable computing. Depending on a USB hub makes it less portable.

If it was legally mandatory for laptops to have at least four USB ports, there would be no more competitive disadvantage for laptop vendors sacrificing unimportant slimness for important practicality.

And to the very few people who consider slim design more important than USB ports and who are going to whine online about the extra 3 millimetres of thickness: Sorry, life is unfair. Your preferences don't matter. Practicality is the purpose of computers. You are the reason laptops are ruined for the rest of us. Get lost.

A while back I was learning web development so I could create web apps. I'm by no means any good at graphic design and whatnot, so every time I'd make a page to rig up with some JS I would get really frustrated with trying to make the page look decent and professional (not professional quality design, but usable as an application in a professional setting), even with bootstrap.

Does anyone have tips for getting over that hurdle? I want to learn, but I get discouraged by my graphical ineptitude.

Back on my university internship.

I knew nothing about web dev and it was a full stack role. I was taught nothing and just sat down and ran entire solo projects for websites and web apps. Everything was down to me including client contact.

Taught nothing and had to learn the entire stack on the fly whilst trying not to get fired or lose clients. Company had no version control for these projects, no quality assurance/testing, no frameworks or anything.

The first 3 months were not a good time.

Hello Apple. Let me tell you something.
Even though i like your phones. I ABSOLUTELY WANT TO FUCKIN KILL YOU FOR YOUR HEADPHONES.
It's unbelievable you cock suckers, evey time the same shit happens.
WHY THE FUCK YOUR FUCKIN HEADPHONES AFTER 3-4 MONTHS START TO BEHAVE LIKE THEY ARE FUCKIN RETARDED.
1st headphones, they started changing songs randomly. That was back when i had iphone6.
It's ok i said, happens. Then i bought the iphone 7 and the headphones started behaving like that after some months. Again. Didn't say anything, i still liked them. So i went to buy the same headphones but for iphone6, with the 3.5mm jack. AND NOW THE SAME SHIT HAPPENS. FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKIN HEADPHONES AND YOUR FUCKIN 200€ HEADPHONES. COCKSUCKERS.

So, anyone knows any good quality headphones?
FUCK YOU APPLE.

You would think that one might get used to the following scenario, but it still pisses me off every time it happens. I'm getting a design created by the customer that is specific to a pixel-level. The product I create in turn is very close to a 100% match visually and functional. And then a few days later, the work already done, I get renewed versions of the same designs. Just like that. With all those nooks and crannies replaced and new ones added, as if it didn't took time, effort and experience to make them functional in the first place. And no one blinks an eye. Not the customer, not our project managers. So after having me built you intricate card board house, you just smash it and tell me to rebuild? It's not always a huge deal but it happens so often and I guess it's part of the "customer is king" mentality, but it's bullshit. If the customer hands in a final design, then that's it. Any changes afterwards need to be paid extra. Otherwise it feels like I'm wasting my time and those changes will not get the same quality treatment for sure.

Well, this happens time to time...

I'm freelancing as a backend guy. I like to take care of all infrastructure before really starting to build anything, this mostly includes dev/staging/prod environments with some linear promotion strategy. So.. I did this API. Still on staging, proceeding with the development as planned, everything goes according the timeline.

And then.. this happens... At some point PM told frontend guy that it's time for production (without notifying me), so the frontend guy does what "anyone" would do in this case - tells PM to create DNS record for production to point to staging app.

Time passes, I'm still unaware of this. But I'm starting to see some quality entries in the DB, not the usual QA crap. I write to them that they're doing good job and continue with my tasks.

One of the tasks required some major DB change. I could've written migrations script, but since we're not in "production" yet, I just wipe the DB and recreate schema as I need it.

In 10 minutes the furious PM starts shouting that "production" is down and I need to fix it ASAP.

I'm lost, I'm asking questions, I'm slowly understanding what's happening...

So I want to grab some coffee, sat back down, wrote politely that they suck, added a finger emoji and terminated the contract.

Felt like the right thing to do as I definitely don't want to continue within the same "team".

Hello everyone, once again I’m asking for your help, for the first time I’m working as a counterpart for an external development company, this project already has a few months of work but there are not any technical documentation or quality metrics.

Would you suggest to ask all the necessary stuff with times, quality and requirements or it’s already impossible to do that?

So I get these spam messages all the time, but correct me if my math is wrong. 15 years of combined experience / 155 employees = 0.096 years experience per employee which is about a month experience each assuming everyone has the same amount of experience. (15 / 155) * 12 = 1.152 (rounded of course). Now I know having the least amount of experience isn’t always a measure of quality since I have about the least in my team yet have been teaching some of the more experienced coworkers of mine some things but if I am trying to sell services I would probably pump up the collective years of experience a bit. Especially if there’s 155 of you.

Broadly there are two things which concerns me:

1: Clients' businesses fail miserably or change their direction.

2: Instead of focusing and improving the quality of their work/product, they prioritise remaining things instead.

BONUS: Don't forget those individuals who dream really big but fails to take any action towards it, just talking. I stay away from these people personally.

Because of these reasons design gets vanished or no longer valid for their new business venture, and don't forget the time and dedication it took to create, as a freelancer it hurts a bit.

I like working for non-profit organisations, most of them look for volunteers. Your work and efforts are alive, and you have to be jack of all trades IMO when dealing with them. Additionally in the process you will meet some extraordinary individuals.

I've left my MacBook to technical assistance for the thrid time. I've bought it on December (the touchbar model, on day one, arrives on December). I paid a lot for it and since then I got s broken key on my keyboard and a faulty display.
Now I got my battery swollen.

Fucking Apple. At least I'm happy with the OS and everything when it's hardware-faults free.

Oh yeah and I switched to MacBook for the construction quality... Bitter irony.

I hope this is the last fucking time, damn.

I want to open a private rehab where I would delete your social media accounts, take your phone/laptop/internet access away, get you treated by a psychiatrist, make you take your pills on time every time, make you work, then spend your free time on quality things like reading books or making art, or exercising, or just sleeping, and when you disobey and say this and that — I'll beat you with a fucking whip. Oh, and you'll have a normal balanced diet with no junk food, sugar or sweeteners.
I swear to god that 90% of people's problems are solved by therapy followed by cattle prodding.

Thread about Quality Analysts/Testers!

I've seen that Managers and HR get a lot of shit thrown their way but I'm surprised to see no love for our QA friends

What was your worst experience with a QA/Software Tester? When was the last time you felt like punching your monitor over an argument with them?

If you're a QA, what has been your worst experience with developers?

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

I need Christmas break so much... Full on sweets from home (my mother sent me a 7kg package), programming whatever I want with no one to tell me what to do and some quality time with the love ones and myself. Fuck work, we should have Christmas breaks every 2 months at least

Over the last few weeks, I've learned two things about the head of my division:

1. They "don't care about code quality"
2. They want to try a "low-code" approach for the web frontend of a completely custom piece of what is currently desktop software

This is despite the fact that we have three full time developers with a wide range of both front and back end skills on the payroll, a deep library of existing components for various frontend frameworks, a custom CSS library, and a decent deployment pipeline for frontend code.

But sure, let's try low-code. Let's see how far that gets us.

We have decent linting on our codebase which covers off code quality and style.

We also have a developer who insists on making code reviews about formatting and spacing rather than functionality even tho we've tried in multiple ways to say:
- our linting covers it, if that's happy we should be (and the rest of the team is)
- it's a waste of time doing it
- it wastes the time of the team reading it
- the noise it generates makes it hard to see any legit comments

I swear to god if I see another comment saying "new line" i will scream.

If there's one thing I hate about devs is definitely when they get too emotional about the reviews they receive.

Doing a thorough review always takes significant amount of time and energy. It's about ensuring high quality of code, about functionality and best practices, ... It's also about learning: I learn from the changes being reviewed while at the same time I also try to teach the author as much as possible, giving down to earth opinions.

It's never (or at least should never be) about attacking the author. There really is no reason why someone would spend all this time getting overly personal.

I used to start my responses with (lousy) apologies for being "harsh", but stopped doing this now that my team understands all of this. It also helped asking them to do the same with my changes. The look in their eyes when they find something is simply invaluable :).

Losing faith in Netflix and their awesome open source projects.

Had a hard time trying to install Security Monkey : poor quality quickstart Ubuntu-only, almost no documentation, same instructions for latest (aka dev) and stable (aka prod) version, no depencies list ... oh and the UI display well only on Chrome ..

Then you surrender and just want to check the dockerized version they provide : it doesn't work neither (build fail or back end process just shut down) !!

I'm done ...

This is one of my really passionate issue with the world, ** Food waste **
Isn't it the most dumbest problem? Every time a marriage, celebration, event happens at the end of the day a huge portion of the high quality food is just thrown into a dump. Does just picking up the trash or disposing the waste solve anything or is it just a way corporation schemed us to believe we are doing something for the world by disposing waste.

I used to associate logitech with quality, something you could spend a little more on and feel comfortable knowing you made a safe and robust choice.

For quite a few years now they've done that gamer branding thing where I'd be embarrassed to have that stuff seen on my desk - at ridiculous prices and for features I won't use. Their consumer/office grade stuff is alright but unremarkable.

I'll gladly pay more for quality and I'm super happy with my Das keyboard, but I switch out my mouse probably every year. I can't deal with mushy buttons and I'm not paying extra for marketing, branding, and rgb lights that I'll then be spending time on trying to disable properly.

I digress, but I'm legitimately curious to try a trackball. I know people kneejerk at it, but I've heard from a couple of people who prefer it when they primarily use their keyboard anyway.

I'm an iOS developer and I cringe when I read job specs that require TDD or excessive unit testing. By excessive I mean demanding that unit tests need to written almost everywhere and using line coverage as a measure of success. I have many years of experience developing iOS apps in agencies and startups where I needed to be extremely time efficient while also keeping the code maintainable. And what I've learned is the importance of DRY, YAGNI and KISS over excessive unit testing. Sadly our industry has become obsessed with unit tests. I'm of the opinion that unit tests have their place, but integration and e2e tests have more value and should be prioritised, reserving unit tests for algorithmic code. Pushing for unit tests everywhere in my view is a ginormous waste of time that can't ever be repaid in quality, bug free code. Why? Because leads to making code testable through dependency injection and 'humble object' indirection layers, which increases the LoC and fragments code that would be easier to read over different classes. Add mocks, and together with the tests your LoC and complexity have tripled. 200% code size takes 200% the time to maintain. This time needs to be repaid - all this unit testing needs to save us 200% time in debugging or manual testing, which it doesn't unless you are an absolute rookie who writes the most terrible and buggy code imaginable, but if you're this terrible writing your production code, why should your tests be any better? It seems that especially big corporate shops love unit tests. Maybe they have enough money and resources to pay for all these hours wasted on unit tests. Maybe the developers can point their 10,000 unit tests when something goes wrong and say 'at least we tried'? Or maybe most developers don't know how to think and reason about their code before they type, and unit tests force them to do that?

Currently in our 4th cycle of manual regression testing for a release and still finding bugs. Automated tests? What are those? That sounds an awful lot like it would take time to implement. Time that could be spent fixing the bugs and getting the release out the door.
When release dates take priority over quality....

!rant

My ecig mod (or box how some call it) started to missbehave, it started at random not liking more and more batteries and generally it was good time for replacment. Fast forward, im at shop, and I have few options, i dont want to cheap out becouse I know how it ends, and I want reaible box for longer and I can pay a little more for that.

So there was few quite competetive options, but most of them had build quality i wasnt fan of, some even plastic outter shell, magnets which tend to break off, but their feature list was quite competetive, and there most expensive of all (400 pln +-90ish $) that seller presented me had (seemingly) no features. No menu even. But build quality is solid buttons feel are just better, and it looks like it could survive longer than half a year. Fine, i shell out what it looked missing features for solid build quality.

I go home, rtfm, and wtf? "Before use update firmware with XYZ software". Okay, done. But hmmm what is that?

It has plethoria, absolute TON of customization but from PC program. Hell yeah, that was fucking good choice and seller missed whole selling point of this box. Like literally, he didnt know its best feature. I can go as far as customize entire GUI on that small screen. Its been awhile since I did my last pixelart thingy but monochromatic so not too bad :)

UMF production quality is kinda shit. Audio issues all the time...

Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.

Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.

Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.

Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.

Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.

Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.

Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.

Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.

I think it's time to say goodbye 😔

quality == time

I think these two must be balanced. How 'bout you?

As my apt renovation is nearly completed it's time to get all the cool toys. And that's where I need your ideas :)

what should I get? What techie-stuff would you think is worth considering?

I for one have wet dreams about vacuuming robots. Not a roomba ofc [bcz it ties to Apple], smth else. I get that an opensource robot would be a pipe dream, but I'd love smth I could control via bash scripts [prolly via lan] at least. Some api would be nice :) . Any advices here? Cleaning quality should be way above 'okay'.

!rant about WordPress

I came across a rant about WordPress this morning. Whatever the quality of the code, there is a lot of good that has come from WordPress.

For a substantial number of people, it has made it possible for them to create their own spaces on the Web that they can use to express themselves, build businesses, and share their lives.

Remember that WordPress arrived at a time when you basically had to use a few large blog services if you wanted your own site. It wasn't perfect then (and isn't now) but WordPress did a lot to democratize the Web.

Decided on Acer Swift 3. Will be getting it soon. 14", i5-8250U, Nvidia MX150 2GB, 4GB DDR4, SSD 256GB. Added another 4GB. Final at $642.

Frankly speaking I am more of an ASUS fan. My potato used to be an apple in good old days and lasting for almost a decade is something I am very proud of it. I will still be using it as a backup PC at my home.

First ever laptop was an Acer and it was ok but didn't have fond memories since it didn't even last for 4 years 😐 Hope Acer has improved their quality in this 9/10 years time. 🤞

Always estimating for the best possible, quality solution. I refuse to write anything less than perfect. Also I estimate the time based on how I feel that day lol.

I think there’s a correlation between my code quality and listening to A Tribe Called Quest. It’s weird. Everything time I put them on I make great code 🤷‍♂️

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

Currently on a project to use AI as music recommending model, an interactive AI model generator and researching on Distributed Systems altogether in three different teams for each thing...

Seems I'm the dirty fish of their team.. 😖

Fucking wasting the time all along the day...

Like Why the Fuck am I degrading my own potential, quality and what not...

Oh god Fucking pick me to the hell NOWWW

Improving the inviting feel and quality of my cube, one carefully placed and effective sticker at a time.

Thank you @dfox + team!

Do you know any open-source and free (as in beer) mockup/wireframe tool for webdesign?

I may soon have two websites to build for little businesses, but I'd like to be able to create mockups for approval before diving into the code. As I was looking for tools, I was surprised to find no free and open-source software for the job. Everything is on a free trial model which I'd be glad to pay for if I had the money, but since I'm really just beginning, I'd rather use something free, and preferably open-source.

I'll use Gimp if nothing comes up, but since it's not intended for this kind of usage, it's a bit more time consuming to create something of quality on it.

Thanks a lot.

Do you want to know why all the popular open source projects have less-than-optimal, sometimes really dirty code?

It's because their developers ditched all the unnecessary stuff to just get the damn thing done. When I choose an open source dependency, I don't need unfinished stuff. I need a stuff that works and has all the features I need from the very start. If it works, I don't care about code quality in my deps.

This is the reason why dirty, rushed stuff with a great idea behind it gains popularity. PHP, Git, jQuery, the list is quite large.

While you've been busy polishing your files hierarchy, these guys already shipped their product, gained adoption, and their userbase doesn't need your product anymore.

This is applicable only for true open source, not "it's developed by a full-time team of principal developers and the CTO is fucking Kent Beck, it costs $1m per month but yea we have it on github".

I have a great chemistry with this coworker.

He lacks some depth of android knowledge but is always very interested in adding new google libs to the project, so we often discuss and come up with the safest, scalable solutions.

He is SE2 and I am SE1.

But one thing that is interesting about him is the way he gives estimations for the tasks. He takes usually that much amount of time that i would take, for a task, but he would quote half the time estimates.

the bosses usually come on the last days to check the feature demo, but QAs gets the first build when a task is completed. I have seen his first builds that goes to QA and most of the time, boy it has some amazingly stupid bugs.

dude would just put a util function, then run the build, if everything compiled, he would just give the build to QA directly. he wouldn't even check that the util function gave an expected output or not.

He is simply wasting QA time n efforts, and risking product quality by not testing enough, but he almost always gets a clean chit for this behavior just because he did the work super fast.

Dude is super cool and i don't envy him for his good luck, but rather think of him as an inferior dev. However bosses think of him as a better dev and my TL even once told me to "be like him"

So i guess this is how corporate works. I will try to apply this in my next role in current/next organisation.

Continuos Integration and Code Quality Systems should work automatically...fucking Jenkins need me all the time. Arrrgh!😠

!Rant

The amount of startup time of a service is a predictor of the quality of its code?

Let's do a story mapping session! Ok cool. PO asks the team: so guys what do you think? *silence*... *more silence*.... PO: come on guys, please respond. *silence*.... Then someone finally responds.

I'm starting to hate this big time. It's almost always like that, no matter the type of session (story mapping, refinement) And there's someone in the team that thinks he always knows best, so if ever someone speaks up, it will always be challenged and lead to useless discussions. He always wants the perfect solution. A good solution is good enough, it doesn't have to be perfect. PO is happy with a good solution (good = maintainable, scoring at least x on our code quality tooling), so why the fuck would you want to go for the 'perfect' solution, which may score just slightly higher in regard to quality, cost much more to develop and people have a hard time maintaining it due to the high level of abstraction? He's always refactoring stuff because it's not future proof. Well, why completely reimplement parts that have been working properly for 2 years and have a very very small chance of needing a change, which then still only needs to be done in just 1 place?

And you know what? All these fancy structures, patterns etc are in there but will their flexibility ever really be used? In my 20 years experience haven't seen such flexibility being really used. Some exceptions of course.

Once it's built, it will keep running, yes, changes will need to be made, but in most cases they never touch all these expensive fancy structured components. Just because most changes are in content or small changes in functionality.

What would you do if you had a safe way to slack whole day in job?

I am working in a giant company, it is easy to camouflage here. I am doing whenever a job is given but those tasks are not developing me. So I execute those tasks slowly. Sometjmes, a good quality tasks are given , I execute them really fine but those are scarce.

I used to study a lot of things during the day, like cpp, python, IoT but i feel like burnt out, just waiting for the end of the day. How can I break out of this situation. I know, for a better job, I must be a better sw engineer but I am wasting my free time(during my work hours) recently and my feeling of guilt is increasing.

How do you pick up yourselves in such mkments?

I was really teasing myself about it a week ago, but I definitely think now that building a language server before I try to get people to try Orchid is the right call.

There is a ceiling to the quality of error reporting without editor support, and because I'm not happy with the best I could've possibly gotten, I didn't really put that much effort into it. Before I got started on the language server, the interpreter would fail with the first error.

Because with LSP the new theoretical limit of DX is the lack of type information which still isn't great but it's a problem I already live with, I'm compelled to meet that limit by perfecting error detection.

It also helps that the interpreter's startup time is 2ms so I can simply run it in thread on every keystroke to generate truly live, basically instantaneous feedback.

I was so fed up with these time-wasting low quality YouTube tutorials. Then I stumbled across these really good egghead.io videos. However, the PRO subscription is expensive for me. Anyone else have tried it before?

Any ideas of the best way or algorithm to reduce the photo size with small effect to the photo quality....
I find it necessary for reducing the traffic cost and time of uploading and downloading the image

That moment when the Dev servers are down and instead of Monday work you're going outside to spend some quality time with the team 😁

So, I’ve been thinking, and I’d appreciate your opinions:

When I work through long tutorials/books where you work towards a large scale app, I.e. through a book you build I fully functioning twitter clone with private messages, secure login etc etc I always create a GitHub repo, but then I break the chapters/modules of the book into milestones, and then create issues for each task within the chapter and assign them to myself.

I also write full on “proper” commit messages.

A part of me feels like I’m a bit weird for treating these sorts of thing like a “real” project, but at the same time, it feels like a good idea to always do things properly so good practices, like quality commit messages, become second nature

- "Two months" training upon hire, with all the other hires too.
- Entire thing takes place in a hotel's larger room meant for small conventions or whatever.
- Brought on as Java developers, told there was Java work for all of us
- By the end of it, there wasn't
- Sit at our company's office for a month doing nothing, waiting for work
- It's summer time, 90F+ heat, and the A/C not only wasn't on most of the time, when it was on it was actually heating the building instead of cooling
- Get on a project, join the client site, takes at least a week to get a laptop, takes a month to get most of the needed accesses
- Was brought on because they needed a SQL Developer, I do not know more than basic syntax which I told them
- Project is 3 months behind already
- Really no development since Offshore handles it (poorly)
- For the first year+ of my time here I am doing nothing but manual quality assurance testing, and no development

It's hard to leave when you aren't learning

Whining about one’s job has become a trend now a days.

A job is not meant to make you feel happy all the times. It’s a bitter sweet affair. Let’s spend a few minutes appreciating the sweet bit that let’s us buy stuff we need and want, pay rent on time, go on vacations, have quality family time and so on…

Hope everyone reading this finds Atleast something they can appreciate about their current job. God bless.