!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

I work at a small company that uses very outdated coding approaches for their solutions.

About a year ago I went through our main application to improve performance and found quite a few areas that I could tackle such as using a dictionary data structure in place of (many) foreach loops that required to pull out a single object.

That specific change yielded a lot of improvement (you can only imagine) and the other developers wanted to learn the ways of dictionaries (because it was so revolutionary and new to them). I showed them many examples so that they could better understand this data structure.

Fast forward to a few months later, saw one of my coworker's code and noticed that they were using a dictionary... And iterating through each kvp similar to a foreach..... Wtf?!

P.S. that person's salary is much higher than mine :(

First time rant. Thanks for listening!

So i was playing around with terminal apps in node.js a few weeks ago and made a CLI version of devrant. Images get converted to ascii just for fun. This is about was far as it goes for me though - anyone want to take it over? (The code is shit - this was a midnight proof of concept). Currently there's pretty much just the rant listings, the login works too but I think @dfox would need to approve it's use.

Next script I'm writing is going to be a terminal rant posting tool so I can rant from my server 😉

$ rant -m "fml" -f ~/screenshot.jpg -t "lol"

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

Wholesome anti-rant.

There’s this Indian chick at work that I really, really do not get along with. Fortunately she’s on a different team so we have practically zero interactions. Her code was always decent, maybe upper junior level? but I went away fuming almost every time we talked.

However, I did a release security review today (I’m down from five/six per month to one) and read through quite a bit of her code. It was clean and easy to read with good separation, clear naming and intentions, nothing was confusing, etc. It was almost beautiful. Had I any emotions I might have shed a tear. I sent her a message and let her know :) I actually learned a better way of doing a couple of things from it.

She has grown so much as a dev.

My employer has a dev studio in Cali.
The office is gigantic.
It has amenities.
It has a stocked fridge full of iced coffee, energy drinks, and apparently wine.
All the devs have totally enviable hardware.
And they probably earn twice what I do, or at least 50% more.

Yet they write absolute shit, never test their code, and push broken updates every day, often marked as "ready for final testing." Their codebase is full of hacks and guesses and stale cruft and worst practices. I wrote a rant recently about one of their fuckups, which involved 18 million Facebook errors per. day. So that should give you some idea as to the quality of their code, and their level of can't-be-bothered.

Again, they make 50%-100% more than I do.

Their whiny lead dev is bloody lazy when it comes to building things correctly, and totally prefers to half-ass everything and complain instead. He probably makes 150% of what I do, doing like 25% as much work, and maybe 10% as well. Doesn't quite compare though, as he's a Unity dev, not a backend dev. So his work isn't as critical.

akagdkdafavskakeuxbfh.
Bloody pisses me off.

"But their cost of living is higher!"
THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE EMPLOYED.

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

My first rant here, don't know how to start, but fuck these self proclaimed senior developers who can't even get their concepts right about basic things and don't believe in reading docs.

Fuck you for asking if sequelize has a method to return details of the logged in user of your app, it's a fucking ORM you dumbfuck. You are a "full stack" developer for fuck's sake.

Fuck you for making those "minor changes" which breaks build and then blame it on any random plugin or lib used, or my commits.

Fuck you for expecting me to review your code on Sundays because you couldn't finish it on time.

I don't like java, at all, but even I get that without it we wouldn't be where we are right now and can't reach where we aspire to reach. But you can't keep chanting "Java is dead, Java is dead" every chance you get. No, it's NOT dead. Nor is going to, anytime soon.

And for god's sake, please stop choosing one library/plugin over another just on the basis of stars on repo, it's not the only (or valid) criteria. Look if you actually even need it. Think.

And please learn how to google first, and also stop using "the" before every the noun, the adjective and the verb. It's the fucking the annoying to read.

And yes, there are different linting presets out there, and just because a piece of code in a plugin/library/boilerplate is not following your specific, and may I say horrible standard, doesn't mean it's a "bad code". It's written by people who have created/worked-on these libraries as side projects on which your entire career is based upon.

And I haven't even talked about the code you write or your domain knowledge or the way you treat other people. So get off your high horse and behave like a developer, a real one.

I just hate npm dependencies.

If you want to write a small website with npm dependencies (some frontend deps like Bootstrap and some development deps like gulp or babel) you will have more npm dependencies in your project than own code. It is ridiculous, how some lazy developers just add dependencies to their projects, without evaluating their dependencies. The source code of one of my projects is around 4MB (without any dependencies). If you then run yarn as required, it grows to around 80MB (where 73MB are node_modules).

This is just terrible.

I rant about this, as I made the mistake to upload my node_modules directories when restoring a backup of my server. Worst idea one could ever have.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

Me: Well, it's time to make a new app!
* opens up VS Code *
* opens folder selection dialog *
* creates a new folder called "notes app" *
* yarn inits that folder *
* installs react and react-dom *
* installs webpack, webpack-cli, babel-core, babel-loader, babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, style-loader, css-loader, file-loader, html-webpack-plugin and clean-webpack-plugin as a dev dependency (install is pending) *
* copies a webpack config from some other project *
* creates a babelrc file *
* copies a yarn script called "build:dev" which would launch webpack *
* dev dependencies installed *
* tries to save *
* vscode doesn't save because files differ *
* tries to copy dev dependencies *
* fail *
* tries again *
* saves *
* writes bare-bones index.jsx *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
* writes bare-bones App.jsx which is a react component but it's an entire app *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
-- trim --
* walks out of his room to his mom's room where's sbc is located *
* grandma plays solitare on laptop *
* i ask grandma for a laptop *
* grandma gives me laptop *
* glues all components into App.jsx *
* yarn start:dev (magic of webpack-dev-server) *
* opens localhost:8080 in firefox *
* searches how to update a component prop *
* nothing found *
* registers on devrant and verifies his email *
* writes this rant *

I have a client (a friend of a friend of a friend) who came to me to build them a "simple" booking solution for their home cleaning business. Easy enough, I first thought.

Having taken a deposit based on my initial quote and contracts all signed, roll on exactly 8 months to where I find myself today.

It turns out, there is no cleaning business as the business will be totally reliant on the website. The original goalposts have now been moved to a completely different fucking country. The (now) required functionality has STILL yet to be finalised (I told client I'm not writing another line of code until EVERYTHING has been mapped out and made crystal clear), as every single face-to-face meeting / back and forth email turns into the client requesting hundreds more brilliant, essential features that make absolutely ZERO fucking sense. And now, to top it all off and push me into writing my first ever rant on here, I've just received an email from the client this morning saying "what I would like to have is like an online restaurant live booking system". WTF?!?!?

I work from home and have only my dog for company today, so please don't judge me. Just needed to let it all out.

DevRant rant:

I am on DevRant for quite a while now and I really enjoy it here. The overall atmosphere is great, as well as the community. (Yes, that includes you!)
Since I came here I've learned some very valuable lessons regarding work (conditions), annoying coworkers and programming itself. I like to think of DevRant as a huge ball of experience by very talented people, as well as a great place for discussions about a topic we all love: code. But lately I am seeing more and more memes on here, with titles like "I think everybody know this", "I think everybody can relate" and "Soo true". Those posts have no value at all and are (most of the time) reposted from 9gag or similar networks. Sometimes those "rants" don't even have anything to do with devs anymore, but are only here to farm ++'es. In the beginning I really enjoyed funny "rants", but now the majority of them just annoy me. It becomes especially annoying when you see the same meme three times in 15 minutes.
I'd be in for some kind of DevFun section, where everybody is able to post his or hers jokes/memes/etc, but the current situation just really gets on my nerves.

I hope that I am not the only one who thinks like that, because I really feel uncomfortable ranting about something I actually love.

end rant

!rant

This dumb pretentious bitch.
We are both computer science students, she is writing her bachelor thesis, I'm in 4th semester, but have 6 years of professional programming experience.
So naturally when she had a problem implementing the MOTHERFUCKING PREPARING SOFTWARE, which she needs to begin writing her thesis I helped her.
First I started explaining every last bit of code, trying to teach her something, so that she wouldn't need my help ALL the time.
After a while I realised that this BLOODY GIRL FROM HELL acquired nearly half her credits by other peoples help, so I just fix the code hoping it would be over soon.
When that software was done, keep in mind, I coded nearly 90 FUCKING PERCENT OF THAT SHITTY ASS PIECE OF CRAP SOFTWARE, she asked me to also "help" her implementing a generator for samples she could test the software with.
Naturally at this point I said I'd be busy with own projects etc. And declined.

So now, nearly 1 Month after she didn't talk to me, THAT ARROGANT PIECE OF SHIT WANNABE SCIENCE BACHELOR asked if I could help her with LaTEX.
At first I was speechless. How could she have that amount of balls, asking me that. As I only am a ranting asshole inside, I declined in the most polite way.

WHAT THE FUCK! I HOPE YOU WILL FAIL YOUR THESIS AND ALL THE 12 SEMESTERS YOU STUDIED WILL HAVE BEEN FOR NOTHING, THUS SENDING YOU TO LIVE ON THE STREET WITHOUT MONEY AND DIE A HORRIBLE AND LONELY DEATH SURROUNDED BY BEGGERS TRYING TO STEAL YOUR KIDNEYS!

Sincerely,
Me.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

I'M SO PROUD, I WROTE A FULLY-FUNCTIONAL JSON PARSER!

I used some data from the devRant API to test it :D
(There's a lot of useful tests in the devRant API like empty arrays, mixed arrays and objects, and nested objects)

Here's the devRant feed with one rant, parsed by Lua!

You can see the type of data (automatically parsed) before the name of the data, and you can see nested data represented by indentation.

The whole thing is about 200 lines of code, and as far as I can tell, is fully-featured.

When you start a new job as a Senior Developer, and start asking questions about the code, and you have these collections of conversations with other front-end people:

Exhibit 1:
Me: Ahh so I see the filtering and pagination is all done with Javascript in the front end...

Random dev: No, it's done with Angular.

Exhibit 2:
Me: I think we should add frontend pagination to this page. There will be too many elements on it if you're a customer with 2000 servers.

Random dev: Don't bother, there's no pagination in the API call... So that will not gain any performance.

Me: But it wouldn't take long to implement and it would improve the user experience, why would you want to show ALL the elements, when you have an option not to... Also, it WILL be a major performance hit, especially on mobile.

Random dev: People will use search anyway.

😥🔪

Also, there are no coding standards, every file looks different, and my opinion is being disregarded in everything, and I thought my last job was bad...

Seriously how are some people hired as front-enders?

Since I just took this job, I feel obligated to stay a couple of months... But hey, don't cry for me, I might have more rants for you. 😂

Sorry for the long rant, here's cake: 🍰

Normally I just read rants but my new assignments is just to much and I have to vent a bit.

So I was assigned on a new company to help them with their automated tests (I'm normally a developer) which was fine for me. Especially when they said a guy that have 10+ years of experience have worked on the framework for a couple of weeks so it should be fine and ready. So I though it would be a quick deal.

But then I got there and... it's the worst C# code I have ever seen. I can live with the overuse of static, long method and classes and overally messy classes that doesn't really seems to fit (it's bad but not unusual in test code it seems). My biggest problem is overuse of the damn "dynamic" keyword.

Don't get me wrong, dynamic can be good and it have it's uses but here they use "dynamic args" in every single method, every one! They don't care if the method only require one value or ten values, they use dynamic args. Then you follow this "dynamic args" parameter going in to sub method after sub method and you have no idea what they use.

And of course they don't know if anyone use the methods correctly (as you have no damn clue what to use without checking the source code) so in 75% of the methods they convert the dynamic to an object and check if it contains "correct argument".

So what I have here is a code that isn't just hard to use, it's a hell to maintain.

So I talked with this with other testers on the team and they agree, but as most of them lack experience they couldn't talk back to the senior that wrote it. So I hope to sit down with him this week and talk this through because it would be fun to hear the arguments for this mess.

/rant

!rant
I just started to use Fira Code as my main font because another awesome user recommended it and I must say, this shit is beautiful. This is what I love about this community. I learn more and get to know more cool shit because of what users say in here than the 5 years I spent at uni. You ninjas rock!

As a German developer living in Germany, I am used to write my code completely in English. In all of my former companies that was also the norm. In one company, we even talked completely in English with each other to a point where even if only German people where in a room, they would default to English at one point in a conversation because it became second nature to us.

(That company was very international and we had a lot of people from all over the world working there.)

Now, I work at a new German company that focuses on the German market. And for some reason I failed to ask them:

Do you write your code in English?

Because that's the norm, isn't it!? I just assumed it to be the case.

Nope! This time it is a mess of German and English term intermixing in glorious abysmal ways I never thought possible.

Sometimes we translate terms, sometimes we don't. So you have to wrap your mind around collections of words that COULD mean the same thing unless they don't. Best case, you have two words for the same thing, but I've seen up to five words (or abbreviations) to describe one business entity. Madness.

And don't get me started on the plurals. In English, it's almost exclusively: add an `s`.

In German, the singular and plural can be the same (e.g. all nouns ending with `-er`) so tough luck determining if you are on an object or an array of objects. (Weak typing language in use does not help either but that's an entirely different rant.)

Your code has so much spaghetti, there's vomit on my sweater already.

(reposted as a rant cos @yatanvesh said so)

<rant>
when you're in a iOS programming class and for the 3rd week in a row we aren't coding. I don't give a flying fuck about steve jobs or apple as a company or their philosophy. Im here to code, not for a fucking history lesson.
</rant>

Not a rant, just my thoughts :)
At November and October of last year I was very frustrated with everything - everything was annoying me and I was bored even with coding. I needed a break and do something different - go somewhere.

So we decided with friends that we will go to Georgia to spent there New Year Eve. Right now I'm coming back from airport by bus to my city aftertrip but can't sleep because I'm energized as fuck! Whole week without internet (sometimes we got open wifi to check buses or maps), without local sim card, without roaming, just our group and good attitude. We visited almost whole north of Georgia riding in taxis, marshrutka, even autostop, and it was fucking awesome.

So, when you are exhausted, take a break and regenerate your baterries, work is not everything! Just wanted to share this with you :) Can't wait to go to work in monday to write some code :) Life is beautiful!

On photo - my friend takes photo of Kazbek Mountain :)

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

Once it really hit me hard. The father of my brothers wife once told me that I'm not fit for IT in general. He thinks that I have pseudo knowledge of IT and Programming.

He just works parttime at home as "computer scientist" and sells routers, pc and such stuff to some private customers. Before he used Filemaker and sayd that he already coded his own CRM with it.

When he said that it really made me sad. But after we talked I looked back what I already achieved:

1. I build for me and friends custom PC's with Case mods and Hard Tube watercooling
2. I can programm in HTML5, CSS3 and PHP
3. I raised a Community with over 60 people in it. We got 2 dedicated Linux Roots (I7-6700K, 64GB RAM, SSD)
4. I manage the Linux Servers on my own with VoIP, Mail-, Web-, MySQL- and Gameservers
5. I built up a complete Community Solution with Game Groups, Forum, Tournament System and a lot of custom scripts.
6. Now Im almost finished learning the C++ Basics to code and manage to learn the beginning of GUI/UX programming.
7. Next thing Im gonna learn is Javascript (Browser) and Java, so I can complete my Web Skills and also can code Java Desktop Apps and Java game plugins (don't rant, Javascript is not the same as Java, I know 😉)

So I thought to myself "maybe in the eyes of others Im not a computer scientist, but then Im on the way to be one at least"

But please dont be a douche (the father) and prejudice me, before you don't know what I already can and achieved.

Just because you're are selling computer parts and installing them doesn't mean, that you are a computer scientist and telling me that I'm not 😉

In IT you're the smith of your own merit!

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

!rant
Yesterday was my first day at my first internship as a naive rising uni soph. I brought my tiny 13 inch thinkpad thinking I was gonna code on that. Imagine my surprise as I walk in and HR brings me to a table with 4 monitors on it. l o l

I like it there.

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

Making a Package Manager from Scratch is hard.

Making a Scratch-like education coding software in XAML is hard.

Setting up a server with zero knowledge is hard.

Creating a new file extension for my project and making it work is hard.

But, as a student,

studying and coding is the hardest thing.

Same 24 hours for everyone, and I should code as well as study.

Time.

The most precious thing in Earth.

==========================================

NASA dislikes this rant.

clean_air_rocks dislikes this rant.

no_suicide dislikes this rant.

students_who_study_and_code_and_wants_to_do_everything loves this rant.

I've been an IT Director for a medium sized company for 11 years...
2 years ago we decided to custom develop an app for online ordering through a third party... This company quoted $36k, I told the team that I think it will be $100k and here is a solution that will do 90% of the needs for $50 a month per location... boss says he doesn't care if it's 200k he wants 100% of what we want and the ability to change it to perfectly fit our needs.... FFW to present... $36k app built by committee of 8 people.. = $400k... and counting for maintenance and adjustments. We now use that $50 a month solution as well to cover another need that would be too costly to code into the original app SMH... and now myself and my team are learning to code to support it internally because.... why would you just hire a qualified person... anyhow, I'm a few months into a self paced online bootcamp and loving it. So ... bright side found! Rant over

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

!rant ~dev

I use my headphones religiously every time I code, as well as for things like tutorials & courses.

I was devastated that the slider switch on my pair of H8s snapped and I could no longer use them wirelessly.

I didn’t want to be without headphones for weeks while they were replaced abroad, so...

Hello upgrade. Hello business expense.

Lovely new pair of H9is.

The last person who might have taken offense at this recently quit, so time for a consequence-free rant. I just want to say...

Fuck absolutely every single one of my teammates who quit this year. Fuck your shitty, undocumented spaghetti code from hell that the rest of us will have to rewrite because it's utterly broken and functions mostly on prayer and luck. Fuck the 1000+ git repos we'll have to rename so we can even begin to tell them apart. Fuck your complete lack of any sort of processes or procedures or standards. Fuck the person who hated tickets and decided we could just have hundreds of people ask us for help on Slack whenever they need it. Fuck the people who quit because we got a new manager who told us we need to support the applications we build. Fuck the person who said "I'm leaving because I want to move forwards instead of backwards" as if fixing bugs in the code YOU WROTE TWO WEEKS AGO is really moving backwards. Fuck the two people who designed their own separate pipelines and then used both without bothering to debate and pick the better one (spoiler: both are completely undocumented and broken as hell).

I hope your various new employers figure out that your strategy of covering shit with gold paint doesn't change the smell.

Now the rest of us have to fix it all, and we're probably going to start by demolishing most of it so we can rebuild it from scratch.

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

!rant
How many of you developers agree with Robert C Martin that commenting should be avoided as much as possible and that it should only arise when we fail to express ourself effectively through code.

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

As a consultant, you get tasked with a variety of stuff. Last few weeks been struggling to maintain an old C++ application that was written by a complete tool of an a$$hole with zero knowledge on how to write maintainable and production quality code. It would hardly run without a crash. First it was a challenge I had to accept, but as I stabilized the code and just fell over even more traps, I had to admit defeat and review my approach.

Rewrite is something I would choose last, but this one ticked all the marks worthy of a rewrite. So, the customer is a very friendly researcher and gladly spent 15 hours with me explaining all the math and concepts - just a delight for a programmer to have such a customer. Two days in, with a DDD approach - a functional, more precise, faster and stable application.

Sometimes there is no rant to share, it's rare to have that perfect communication with a customer that is so dedicated that he spends so much time teaching you his speciality and actually understand your approach. DDD was really a lifesaver here, by using it's key concepts and ubiquitous language. The program is essentially 8000 lines of math, but wrapping it up with value objects and strong domain models made me understand his domain and him mine. It also allowed me to parallelize the computations, giving me a huge performance boost. Textbook approach, there will not be many like this!

!rant
When I was in 8th grade and was learning to code (c++), I sincerely believed that calling a function within a function simply calls it again (like in a loop) . I had never heard of recursion.
And I actually made a small project in which I called a function again and again thinking that calling another terminates the previous one.
No wonder my program kept crashing. I have still kept that code with me as a wonderful memory.

I know this isn't particularly interesting, but I just saw that code today and felt like sharing this...

Cs Student. We currently have a course on algorithms, where we have to implement something in Java, test it with some sample inputs and in the end submit it to an online judge, so far so good. So why a rant? Well there's this one person, who strugles with programing and asks me a lot of questions. Usually I tell her, could you send me your code, so I can have a look at what doesn't work/where you made a typo/what ever. My thoughts: let's just copy it my IDE, take a look at the error message, and that should do it.

Guess how I got the code: As a few photos, taken by her mobile phone (as the code doesn't fit on one screen...)! Just send me the fucking file, or post it to gist.github.com or pastie.org or what ever fucking code sharing tool you want! Make a fucking git repo, I'll even live with SVN or just a .txt file by mail. But for the love of Linus Torvalds, stop sending me crapy pictures of your crappy code! For fucks sake!

!rant

One day Boss was doing code review of my work
Boss to me: What the fuck dev1!?!? All efforts I spent to quit smoking and your XML routine gave me cancer anyway!

Another day, a colleague needed to make change to a program that hasn't been changed in looong time and sees a commit from our Boss done 15yrs ago!!!

Dev2 to Boss: Boss this signal catching routine sucks dicks! How did you become a our Boss?
Me to dev2: He sucked as many dicks as his routine did
Boss to us: Oh look! Performance appraisal is due this week. Bye-bye 7.5%

Here 7.5% referring to pay raise that is average pay raise

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

Security rant ahead, you have been warned!
As part of a scholarship application, our government requires a scan/copy of the applicant's credit card. Since the IBAN is now on the back, you have to send both sides.
The back is also where the CVC (security code) is. Any bank will strictly tell you NOT TO EVER SHARE IT - not even with them!
To make things even more fun, you now have the option to send this over email which is, of course, NOT ENCRYPTED!!!!!
I'm basically sending all the info needed to steal all my money over an unencrypted connection to an underpaid secretary, who will print it out and leave it on their desk for anyone with decent binoculars to see.
These people are fucking insane!!!!

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

!rant
Be me, reading the slides of the courses I missed for my semester abroad, when I hit this slide :
"Always code as if the person maintaining your code was a serial killer who knows where you live"
I think I'm going to enjoy my semester in Mérida, México 😀

Long rant 😤😤😤

Today I was going to hit my project manager in the face. I can't stand people like him. In every fucking meeting he starts talking about his past successes and we are forced to listen to him. In this sprint, we had a tough task which took more time than planned. So we didn't finish it till the deadline. After working hard all night long I finally managed to get the job done. And today guess what happened? He didn't fucking appreciate it. All he was talking was mediocre look of the module we've developed for the website. And it's not even my job to make a beautiful design as a back-end developer. At a point I wanted to resign. I don't know how much I will stand this situation. He has always been like this since he came to the company. The worst part is, he is not a senior developer or something. Al he talks about is some fucking old jobs he has done we don't know if they are real or not. From every meeting we suspect his skills are limited. He just knows how to talk. He has never reviewed a single line of code because he doesn't know PHP (yes I know, I know). Hell he doesn't know any back-end language and he is supposed to create a new architecture for the website. He don't have enough database skills neither. All he says he has worked as a mobile and front-end developer. So now I'm home and don't know If I should resign or not.

Complete and total rant:

You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN

I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.

But...

I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.

But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.

So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?

AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

!dev !rant but still funny story

As the goth of the dev team, sometimes people ask me several things about me.

I was working on my code. It was 3 or 4PM and a bored dev asks came to me

He: Have you ever tried to be a vampire?
Me: No, I’m just a goth
He: Do you know a vampire?
Me: Unfortunately no, but I’ve heard of them.
He: Do they suck blood?
I don’t know if he was asking because of curiosity or in a sarcastic mode. As usual, I answered in a polite way explaining him what means to be a vampire, the types (blood and energetic) and the difference between a goth and a vampire.

While I was explaining to him this, the boss came into the office, heard me talking about the energetic vampires and said “Wow wow wow! What is coming on here?!” 😂

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site has been a huge source of fun and laughs for me on bad days.

So dear fellas,

I've been a software engineer for about 5 to 6 years which was intense as fuck and I've been burnt out multiple times. My highest rank was a senior software engineer so far.

I was offered a new job recently as a Technical lead for a small team which would mean I have to make architecural decisions on top of good ol grunting out the code. I took up the offer but I'm more worried than happy.

Impostor syndrome has kicked in heavily ever since I agreed to the job. What if they realise I don't know certain things that engineers are supposed to know? What if I get in an embarassing situation where somebody asks me a question and I'm not able to answer? What if people who I work with laugh behind my back cos I'm not a rockstar engineer?

I'm depressed and scared as fuck right now. Usually I had someone senior to ask my questions or get my doubts cleared with, now it looks like I'll be making those decisions and getting things done and I'm shitscared and worried as fuck.

Does anyone have any pointers, tips or anecdotal advice that might help me? It would be much appreciated.

Sorry for the incoherent rant. Have a good one y'all

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

!rant

Whenever I open someone elses code, I do a project wide search for "FUCK".

Found many of these:

die("FUCK")
// fuck this
// #todo FUCK

Works on github as well. 😂🤣

!rant
As a self taught, I used to break what i want to learn into pieces and watch tutorials where people use these pieces. Then I could easily do what I learned, but I could do it exactly how I learned it from the tutorials.
Until one glorious day I found a tutorial about js that doesnt teach you the "how" of things but the "why" of things.
I cant describe how easy and in depth I understand js tutorials now. It is easier even when I have to learn a new framework.
It feels like I fast-forwarded my knowledge growth overnight.
I now see my 3 weeks old code and it disgusts me.

!rant
Just started working for a new company. Super cool. Just like the last one (as far as perks), except they actually trust their devs.

Old company: Make sure your code is extensible
Devs at old company: You know it's not written in stone right?
Old company: Does that mean you can make it do this?
Devs at old company: No. That's the wrong code base

New company: I need a feature. Get it done when you can
New company devs: Well, guess I'll take some time to refactor all this stuff while I'm at it
~Some time later~
New company: Thanks, that feature works great!

No staring over shoulders, asking when it will be done. No asking why we want to refactor something. As long as work continues to flow, there are no issues. It's great!

Also, if we want to try a new tech, we just have to put together a short paper explaining why it will work better in that situation than the tech that's already in place.

Earlier this day (or yesterday, timezones 'n stuff) I posted a "rant" about my new Project:

"The Spigot Web Framework" - a Tool that should help Owners of Minecraftservers without dedicated Webserver and knowledge about developing a website.

In the Screenshot below I show you guys, how few lines of code can make a beautiful website.

The Modulemanager is fully done and people can build their own Modules, which can be live updated.

I am currently working on "cross communication" between the Client and the Modules.

I hope you guys stay tuned!

EDIT: As mentioned in my last rant (look @comments) I will be able to pull off a standalone version of this software.

Saw a rant about a teacher so I thought I'd share one of my experiences.

So I had this teacher who was supposed to teach us the basics of web development (HTML, CSS and some basic PHP).
Now this guy didn't really like me very much but that is besides the point.
One day me and a classmate were working on an assignment in class, we ran into a problem but we couldn't find the mistake in the code. So we went to ask the teacher. We explain the whole thing, the teacher stares at our code for a good couple minutes (while the problem can only be in a few lines) and then says something along the lines off: "I don't like that you put your curly brackets on the same line as the if statement, fix that first and then come back"

Needless to say, my classmate and I were standing there with our minds blown.

He knew nothing about PHP, all he did was read out power points.
On top of that, a quick LinkedIn search proved that he normally works as PM an that he has no coding experience!

WHY WAS THIS DUDE FUCKING HIRED????

rant!

Gets hired as a C++ programmer. for the past weeks I have been designing UI interface without writing code.

#FML

Disclaimer: This is not a Windows hate rant as this problem has been solved by Microsoft(partially).

I went to a hackathon last year at an engineering college. It was not such grand hackathon as people have in USA or Europe. So I entered in this competition trying to develop a medical app which asks the user detail about his/her problems then asks questions to match the symptoms of diseases. So me and a guy(who isn't a coder) tried to develop that app. He provided the data of diseases, I tried to develop kind of AI app with those data but found that job too hard for one day hackathon. So I wrote an email for api medic for their api which I was going to use. I then coded continuously for 4 hours in Android studio for the android app. The event manager told us late in the day that repo had been made for the hackathon and we must push our codes before 12 that night. The event manager provided the repo very late that day maybe around 6. I did a big mistake not creating my own repo on github to save every code I had written from time to time.(After this e vent whatever I code I save it in a repo). I was running Windows 10 on one of my laptop and ubuntu on my another. Due to some divine badluck I was using my Windows 10 laptop on that hackathon. So around maybe 10 I was about to wrap up the day push the code to repo. I went to getself a cup of coffee and returned to find lo and behold fucking BSOD. I was fucked, it was my first hackathon so made another misatake of using emulator rather than my android phone. My Android phone was not responding good that day so I used the android emulator.

From that day on I do three things:
1. Always push my projects to github repo.
2. Use android phone after running some minor tests on emulator.
3. Never use windows(Happy arch user till eternity.)

You might be thinking even though BSOD, it can be recovered. But didn't happen in my case, the windows revert back to the time I had just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10.

Boss is also a programmer which is nice. boss is also incredibly impatient. so when he gives me a project to do, when I don't have it done the day of, he goes and does it over the weekend. but he doesn't tell until a few days later when I finish the following Tuesday. he chucked my git branch and just pushed his stuff to master. then he belittled me because there was a feature missing in his code and I hadn't done it yet. I don't know how to deal with this. on the one hand, I could try and work faster. but on the other, I am trying to add features to software he wrote in c-style c++, didn't comment, and hasn't been updated to modern standards since 1998. even the copyright files are 1997 to 2001. just very discouraged as its my first job in the field. it wouldn't have been so frustrating if he had just told me he'd worked on it himself instead of letting me finish it and then throwing it in the trash.

end rant

Has anyone ever ordered off RedBubble? Are they even a legitimate company?

Rant...

20 days ago I ordered a package from redbubble.com

They shipped the package, without an apartment number. So the delivery was refused and it was sent back to them.

I reach out to support and they ask me to send them a complete mailing address and my order number.

I send them my exact mailing address and the order number as they requested. They inform me that the package is being sent out again ASAP.

This morning I see that the new package has shipped, WITH NO FUCKING APARTMENT NUMBER.

I email them to let them know this. They inform me that since it has my zip code it will be fine (which is a ridiculously stupid this to say).

So I actually call the post service and ask them if the address will work, they let me know that of course, it will not get to me if there is no apartment. Duh!

So, I email RedBubble support again to let them know this.

I expect some sort of answer as to why this is happening. But the following happens.

They send me a refund.

Let's be clear, I did not as for a refund. I asked for the order I made to be shipped to me.

So it seems that putting an apartment number on a shipping address is completely impossible for this very unprofessional company.

After 2 weeks of bullshit, I will be receiving nothing at all from these shady cunts.

Fuck RedBubble it seems.

Well I FUCKING FINALLY managed to build a program that makes my dad's printer print automatically.
Have ranted about this on my previous rant.
My recent approach was actually overengineered all over the top. I was using pyautogui to simulate the mouse that would call the settings window on Windows, which would print a nozzle test (the translation for "Düsentestmuster" according to google?). The more I worked with it, the more I would have had to care about edge cases when calling the settings and god knows what else...😖
So I left the idea.
What I came up with was a python script with some copy-pasted code of an example from the win32print api that printed an image that I specified, so it would use all inks. Somehow it works perfectly...
After that I used the win32api. ShellExecute() with ghostscript to print a PDF for the PGBK ink.
Finally a batch script to run this python script on the task scheduler. No converted .exe as dependencies and whatnot let it all go to hell.😒

It's not quite what I had originally anticipated as a solution but IT FINALLY FUCKING WORKS!!
...😪 It took way longer than expected and although I somehow couldn't manage to print all on 1 paper, I'm still satisfied that it really works.

That's all, had to vent my frustration and share this personal success.

Applied to a Jr. Dev job and was hired as a Digital Marketer — I can deal with this, I’m AdWords & Analytics certified. What I can’t abide is that I spent the last year working my ass off learning to code and the person next to me with the Jr. Dev position only uses DIVI and has zero inclination to study, learn or write basic HTML & CSS—much less PHP. I’m not an expert by any means but I love programming, I love the problem solving, the challenges and the culture of it all. So far, and these are only two examples, I’ve shown him how to use the target attribute to open a page as a new tab, and how to register a nav in the functions.php file to create a menu but he is unwilling to even attempt it. Rather, he told me that I was too technical and that no one would be using code in this day and age.

For the record, I think DIVI is a cool platform, it’s clear that my boss knows nothing about code to be fair and I love my job— this is my only issue so far😂 I just needed to rant.

I get about 4-5 hours sleep. Like today: I went to work, made my lunch at work, got changed for football, played football from 7-9pm got home at 9:30, cooked, ate, showered and dried my hair and it's now 1am.

Tomorrow I got football training for another team so again I'll be getting into be at about 1am.

Also I forgot go mention ive got to get up at 6 for work And Friday I have to be at the doctors for 7. Yeyyyyy me!!! Don't even ask me about the weekend...

I feel like this classifies as a rant because I don't get to code at the weekends and it kills me 😡😡 especially when I want to contribute to certain packages and said I would. So fuck you social life. Fuck. You.

Ohhh and those fucking 'friends' that guilt trip you into seeing them because "you haven't seen me in ages 😢😢" there's a reason for that Barbra (keeping her identity secret) I'm fucking depressed and tired. Fuck the fuck right off.

!rant

Got back into android development recently and while everything was pretty flawless ( I managed to get the basic concepts implemented in a day) something wasn't right.

For some reason I was not happy with the code i wrote, although I took examples from google and tried to adapt their code style. It looked aweful. I hated my code.
But the code itself wasn't the core of the problem. I could easily add new features and replace components with new implementations without breaking the app. All those "good code quality" identifiers were there.

Turn out the problem is Java. Or to be more specific: Java 1.6
Every listener which only calls a single function once a worker has finished needs 6 lines of code. If you implement the inferface in the class it gets messy once there are multiple workers and you have a generic interface. And there are no lambdas!

So I made the switch to Kotlin.
The app was converted to kotlin in 30 Minutes​. Android studio can convert the classes automatically and very little manual work is needed afterwards.
After that I spent 2 hours replacing the old java concepts with Kotlin concepts: lamdas, non-nullable types, getters and setters in kotlin style (which in this case is c# style) and some other great thing.
The code is good looking now. I like it. I like kotlin as it has a lot of cool things.
Its super easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to get into it. It combines concepts from java, javascript, c# and maybe a few other languages to form a modern jvm 1.6 compatible typesafe language.

Android dev is fun again!

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

First Rant here.

So I was working on some integration test issues when I found this by accident made by a professional level SW engineer:

@Test
public void testMethod() throws ApiException {
Response res = null;
try {
res = serviceToTest.callMethod();
} catch(Exception e) {
assertNull(res);
}
}

Was wondering why tests were being green after some code changes I've made cuz tests could have not been green afterwards.

Together with a senior (I'm also professional only) I've tried to explain him for a good 1-2hrs why this code is useless and he still did it. Good thing there are no errors in the real implementation from him after fixing the tests as it's code freeze here and we are having go live in a few days 🙃

Also luckily he isn't working on our code anymore and has only been doing so for a few weeks.

Wasted a day with it and gonna check all of his code now before I run in the next surprise.

CTO: We'll use epochs for any time related fields in our services.

After service integration...

Dev from producer team: Hey the time field is showing up as 1970 and not null in your table. That seems to be a bug.

Me: Code looks fine. We are converting epochs to timestamps here. Null is taken care by the library function itself.

The same dev: Actually we are sending zero instead of null values in that time field. But we'd want the end table to treat that as null.

Me: Why can't you send null then?

The dev: Actually avro doesn't support nulls. Hence the zero.

Me: WTF??????

Manager to me: Actually you need to convert them as null. Anyways, this is not a blocker and we can live with it for now.

END OF RANT

Why can't they fucking send it as null? And when I asked about the details, that particular event type doesn't require that field. Still the manager insists on sending that field for it.

!rant, TL;DR at the bottom

Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]

And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]

and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]

His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]

Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"

Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.

TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.

For fucking fuck sake I fucking hate those dense motherfuckers with professor degrees from university. Lazy shmucks.

How, HOW, can you, as a sentient human being, force anybody to use Netbeans for the fucking final project? Two SOAP services, two REST services and PHP for communication? In Netbeans!? WTF. You didn't even teach us PHP for fuck sake. Why can't I choose technology I'm using!?

And to top it all of, Netbeans is the worst IDE I've ever used. I'd rather kill myself with a spoon than use for even one more project. How can ANY TEACHER use it for lectures and tasks? Using it teaches you fucking nothing, because it's generating code for you. It makes you braindead when you just look at it. It's works like shit and looks like shit.

P.S.
I hope that devTea's swear-words blocker will have some fun with this rant.

It's rant time again. I was working on a project which exports data to a zipped csv and uploads it to s3. I asked colleagues to review it, I guess that was a mistake.

Well, two of my lesser known colleague reviewed it and one of the complaints they had is that it wasn't typescript. Well yes good thing you have EYES, i'm not comfortable with typescript yet so I made it in nodejs (which is absolutely fine)

The other guy said that I could stream to the zip file and which I didn't know was possible so I said that's impossible right? (I didn't know some zip algorithms work on streams). And he kept brushing over it and taking about why I should use streams and why. I obviously have used streams before and if had read my code he could see that my code streamed everything to the filesystem and afterwards to s3. He continued to behave like I was a literall child who just used nodejs for 2 seconds. (I'm probably half his age so fair enough). He also assumed that my code would store everything in memory which also isn't true if he had read my code...

Never got an answer out of him and had to google myself and research how zlib works while he was sending me obvious examples how streams work. Which annoyed me because I asked him a very simple question.

Now the worst part, we had a dev meeting and both colleagues started talking about how they want that solutions are checked and talked about beforehand while talking about my project as if it was a failure. But it literally wasn't lol, i use streams for everything except the zipping part myself because I didn't know that was possible.

I was super motivated for this project but fuck this shit, I'm not sure why it annoys me so much. I wanted good feedback not people assuming because I'm young I can't fucking read documentation and also hate that they brought it up specifically pointing to my project, could be a general thing. Fuck me.

!rant

The efficiency of every dev stack in the world will never compare to just dropping my folder of php code into a server, with proper configurations, routes envs and everything else into a folder and watch it run.

I a pops shop wants me to build something for them? php

If an enterprise grade with a lot of users comes about? php

I have yet to have a single issue with it as most of you evee poluted, herd ready, mob mentality mfkers want to make believe.

Legit, the language is flawed, but has yet to fuck with me, i have memorized the quirks and fuckups of the language (much like I have done with JS) to know that a lot of you just bandwaggon over shit.

"It DoeSnt hAve proPer geNerics"

boom, deployed a form to a customer for his site, charged $2k for a one day job with no issue. But go ahead, setup an entire fucking pipeline of dependencies, a .net app and/or an entire bs app in node or rails(which I love btw) or an entire fuckState centric app in Go that gets messier the more you look at it and it would not be as easy or as simple to deploy.

Legit, in my entire career, nothing makes my life simpler for the web.

!rant

I am new to coding, and I am trying to find a platform to host my code. Should I choose GitLab.com or GitHub.com. Maybe the better question is: Will my code be as accessible on GitLab as it is on GitHub?

A rant about people in general:

I am sick of people not caring, not giving a fuck, not valuing others.

Studying CS this is something I noticed the past year: people tend to not acknowledge that there are other human beings around them.

Some are just focused on getting their degree done and dusted as fast as possible, which is fine.
Some are working to pay the rent or student loans, which is fine.
Others just do their thing, code their stuff, criticize other's code... which is also fine.

But nobody's realizing they're interacting with other people! Other living, feeling human beings. For them it's just about getting it done.

And not just at university.
I've started seeing it everywhere.

At the job I'm working, people in the shops and on the streets.

I don't get it. We are all human on this rocky sphere in space. Why do so many not care for each other?

It makes me sad.

OMFG. Here's a self-rant for you all...

So, working on a JS library to build widgets, I five across some weird behaviour where I expect `$.ajax.apply()` to pass something to the chained `.done()` method, but it comes out differently.

Fuck. Right, time to visit StackOverflow and glean some knowledge.

I post a question, complete with examples and descriptions and a little midget unicorn in the corner for world peace.

Come back a bit later to see what's happened, and nobody understands my damn question!

So I proceed to debate a few points with some other devs, going back and forth for a while, but still nobody knows what I'm asking.

Fuck. Time for a JSFiddle...

Copy code from the jQuery docs and start modifying it to show what I was working with... Now suddenly is all working as the docs say.

O.o

So I go look back at my own code again to try work out what's actually going on.

Turns out I completely missed MY OWN CODE.

Fuck me.

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

Hello everyone, first time ranter here! I have been studying Computer Science for 2 years starting September. The program introduced me to Java,HTML,CSS, JS and php. I feel like even though I am currently studying this I still do not "know" how to code. For example when I look at my classmates when they code it all seems so effortless and smooth, if they run into an issue they will usually solve it within the hour where as when I run into an issue I struggle to even see what the problem is. So the real point of this rant is, how do I improve? I am currently doing the #100daysofcode to get better but sometimes I feel so far away from calling myself a "developer" what is your road to the "developer" title? did you struggle as much as I am at the moment? or did you just sail into it like my classmates?

!rant

The AH-MAZ-ING feeling you get when you write 200 lines of code without compiling and everything just works as planned!!!

YAY!

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

!rant

Our implementation director got bored since yesterday. So, I decided to let him barge in with my colleague and let him manipulate the audio speakers. Things got funny and asked me to code properly so he can take a shot and send it to his friends. What I did, I copied and paste the code and saved as .bat to make the console looked like the matrix while coding. 😂😂

!rant
So this is my desk.. really organized and clean as you can see.
Let's start from the left.
That naked motherboard you see is my enterprise grade server running Debian on an intel i3 something with 4GB of ram and a 500gb hdd.
Moving on to the right you can see some flutes (Notice the pink one).
Then there is my beloved laptop running Manjaro Linux with VS code open on a random script.
Following you'll see my BEAST tower pc with lovely RGB keyboard and mouse and another random project open.
And I guess that is it. Enjoy

Rant!
Got an email from an extension developer who releases code under GPL. Had a list of all sites using "our copy" of his software and demanding that we pay twice as much now for download access. We've only asked for support on one domain ever so this feels like an underhanded way to treat customers when your software is supposed to be GPL.

Absolutely need his product so we paid it. Feeling very annoyed that GPL software license isn't really being honored. And it's creepy that he's tracking it that way.

- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.

- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).

- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.

- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.

- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.

- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.

- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.

- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.

Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like.

First rant from my new job.
I got a position as backend-dev in a startup and for now i'm learning angular. Yes, you read that correctly, because the frontend-team is short-staffed i decided to switch teams. We are 3 people and neither one has sufficient angular-experience (the framework was a management decision).
First of all i got confused because we use slack and trello but the frontend-lead decided to do some stuff via google-spreadsheet too. Then we didn't have any code in our repository until yesterday. I tried to check out the repository after that, did an npm-install but when running ng serve i got an error "css-file not found". It turns out you had to download some files from the official website and put them in the unversioned node_modules directory. It was the teamlead's decision to do so and me and my coworker got really annoyed when we tried to set up everything on our end. But that's not all, yesterday the other dev's merged their first versions of the project. But not via git, that is way to mainstream. The coworker had to upload his code into the cloud and the teamlead copied the files into the project folder.
Aside from that the code already isn't the best, some things should be done differently imo and we have credentials in the code (not in some separate files, but in an if-else-clause that checks node.env.production).

We'll have a discussion about this tomorrow, let's hope things can be straightened out.

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

!rant

After two years of learning front end librairies and some javascript my mate just threw me into our java backoffice to help him do the testing.

I read so much shit about java， i was a bit apprehensive... But man the more i learn the more i think code is beautiful.

Well i for the first time am starting in java today and its beautiful as well ;) like，i can`t remember having had so much awe for something in a long time.

I just wrote this code, let's see if the dude who is going to work with it after me will rant about checking state right after setting it as null.

I wonder if he will know why I did this ...

It took me way too long to understood what I wrote few weeks ago. After looking at the code for few minutes and looking at my db structure, I finally realized. I also instantly remembered that I wrote that "user is shown as ad" comment hoping I will not confuse myself in future. Apparently I failed.

Temporarily added next line of comment to help the future me.

Deep down I know that I should change function name itself to become clearer, more meaningful and easier to understand.

But writing that comment, making those screenshots, combining the 2 images in Pinta and writing this rant is faster than thinking the new name.

!rant

Been working on a custom html partial injector (js/jquery only) as both a personal challenge and utility to use for my website scaffold. Being a challenge, i decided not to look at any implementation from another JS framework. I won't lie, i had it 'working' at least 5 times now, but this time, after about 3-4 days, i think i got it for real. And the cool thing? It's a bit less code than my original implementation even with my generous whitespace and verbosity. And it even unwraps nicely so it looks like a regular html page in the dev tools.

I love when things finally work as they should--God knows i question my motives before then.

!rant

Designed and written > 1.3k lines of code this week and 98% test coverage..
CI and CD set up and working..

Was a Long week and very exhausting but I feel really good now, happy to start the weekend with whiskey and beer.

This is gonna be one of my most productive sprints so far..

Hope you all had a successful week as well.

Happy Friday 🍻

And please don’t start with any „that’s nothing, I’ve written 5k lines ones“ comments.. It‘s professional, stable, optimized code and code I can actually be proud of.

I have been very inactive in these last couple of months but I really need to rant right now:

I am working on a project, which is also part of a contest, with a few of my friends. I asked one of them to write a bit of code and some documentation about it, here's the result:

He wrote half a page of text with plenty of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors but here comes the even worse part:
Instead of just leaving the code in its own file he copied it into the word (libre office writer) file as well. Now I have got 3 pages of non-indented code with a few comments flying around here and there, weird variable names and a lot of commented out pieces of code.

Bloody hell I feel like I am the only one in this team taking this contest serious.

Keep this in mind: I don't like WordPress and PHP at all!!!
So a couple of days ago my boss asked me if I could extend a custom made WordPress plugin made by our intern. First thought: sure why not? Boss says: it has to be done in less than 100 hours of work (an estimate done by my boss and the intern). Me: I can't tell you that before I have seen the code and what functionality has to be in the extension. Boss: Cool, look it over this weekend and tell me if you want to do it or not.
I looked it through and my answer will probably be: NO WHERE IN HELL am I gonna are this in less that 100 hours! 1. no tests has been performed so I have absolutely no clue if his code works.
2. variable names are mostly: $string_query (whatever that means?), $result, $string_temp and so on.
3. Methods and functions are more than 250 lines long, with shitty formatting, and more comments than code. WTF?
4. The estimate has been made by an intern and my boss (doesn't know much about programming). I haven't been consulted about it....
5. No version control. No branches, no commits other than initial commit. Great.
6. Most comments in the code just tells me what I can read from the code. What it returns and what it takes as params. Can I please know wtf your method call named $booking->run () does? I still haven't found this method in the code after 1 hour of intensively looking for it...

FFS man... Not gonna do this, even though I thought it would have been an interesting project initially.

Sorry for the long rant... I just wish the intern would have consulted me about all this shit, since he obviously have bad practices. *sigh*

!rant // deprecated but who cares

I just wanted to write down something i realized. I realized that that I stopped growing as an individual a while ago.

Being a student put me in constant stress situations. I had to do things quickly. Lern things fast, drop things I don't understand immediately, move on, and repeat. I think this corrupted me, turning learning into something that it's not supposed to be. Even making me reject other people's opinions sometimes, which disgusts me every time I think back to it.

When I started programming I'd always try to read the code, until i completely understood what exactly this code was doing. Something I stopped doing a while ago because of the mentioned time constraints.

But today I got the hit by the consequences (German: Ich hab Retourkutsche abbekommen)

I was implementing an algorithm today, while my partner was writing the main program, which acted as indirect test cases. And the errors were discovered one after another because of my misinterpretation. Or Simply put, my lack of knowledge. Because it was already late, we stopped soon afterwards but I wanted to solve this problem by tomorrow. I really wanted to get my head around this algorithm, so that i could solve it with confidence. After getting my head smoking I felt something I haven't in a while: the feeling of achieving something. Making me finally realize not only how the algorithm was actually meant to work but it also made me again realize what learning is about.

Use your damn head.
Don't look away from the problem, solve it! Learning is about challenging yourself!

Sorry for stealing away so much of your time. Like i said, i just wanted to write this down. Maybe to burn this into my mind, to keep me on the right track from now on. But I also hope that i could deliver my message to someone that needed it as well.

Also it's late and i should have gone to sleep long time ago. 😴😵
I just hope my grammar didn't suffer because I'd that

!rant this is just a shoutout, how fucking happy I am. Clean code valued over fast but hacky push of features!

Backstory. I work for a startup. Long story short a guy with an idea needed a developer. I've worked for about a year without pay but now since we're live I get paid. Recently a new field of bussiness came up. I told tge guy with the idea (a.k.a. my boss) that we either could just "hack" the current code to just make it "fit" well kind of... Or refactor our main code base, as requirements where changing at least monthly and we just built on top of the monolith.
Don't get me wrong. It still isn't perfect. However I was able to refactor the main business logic for the last few days, as he understood, it's an investment into the future.
Good guy!

P.S. On another note: happiness or happyness? :O

Hey this is the first time i post here.

I just started working part-time for this company last week. What i have to do is to change some windows from Win32 to WPF. As i was reading the legacy code i just had to sigh man. They have like 100 projects in a single solution, from C++ to C#, everything acctached to each other, with almost NO comments or docs. Wtf man? I don't know how it actually works in the industry (this is my first dev job) but when you write fucking 20 classes with each one contains bunch of attributes, methods, properties, you can't just leave all the code's semantics in their names. And by the way the app is so fucking ugly i bet they have appointed part-time developers as UX engineers... Even i have little knowledge about UX/UI, i just can't bear with this kind of ugly and confusing and unintuitive production with a cost of a good photo editting software.

Ok there may be much more to rant in the future but let me try through this and tell you more. Have a good day. :)

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

!rant but wondering,
I'm doing Instrumented test for my android app, and wrote that code to check if the fragment loads data and click on first item and check if all is working as expected, am I doing it right?

Any help would be great :)
Warning: LIGHT theme ahead, room brightness is higher than my screen and I can't see shit in dark theme :\

2nd rant this week on PHP PDO

PHP 💩:
PHP message: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2014 Cannot execute queries while other unbuffered queries are active.  Consider using PDOStatement::fetchAll().  Alternatively, if your code is only ever going to run against mysql, you may enable query buffering by setting the PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY attribute

Me 🤬:
THATS WHAT I’M FUCKING USING. STOP FUCKING COMPLAINING. YOU DIDN’T LIKE THE FUCKING COLONS FOR YOUR FUCKING PARAMATETRS, NOW YOU HATE YOUR OWN FUCKING FETCHALL() METHOD YOU PEICE OF SHIT, AND YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY OTHER ACTIVE QUERIES AS IT’S THE FIRST FUCKING QUERY. ARRGHHH!!!!!

What the actual fuck is wrong with PDO. It bitches about everything 😡.

!rant

Yet to meet a dev who is a health nut. The code of the world is built on caffeine, fast food, and snacks as far as I know.

In This Rant: A mildly satisfying piece of mind story.

Using code to prove yourself right is a hell of a drug.

A few weeks ago I whipped up a tiny program that downloads configs from hardware we manage. Since the vendor's API documentation is hidden behind a pay wall, my method of extraction is different. It results in bigger files, but testing showed it to still be valid.

Enter today. Interns at work downloaded a config to load onto a spare machine and it won't work.

"TheCapeGreek, your configs don't work"

I was confused since I tested the files when I built it and it worked. I am also currently fleshing out that download utility's features so the fear that I've been wasting the past 2 weeks on improvements is looming.

Last 15 minutes of the day and nothing else to do so I figured I might as well whip up a string comparer. The smaller file's content is scattered in the big file so a direct diff won't work.

Code it all, quick hardcoded proof of concept code, bit it got the job done. I was right, my bigger file is still correct!

Turns out the issue was with the machine they were configuring. They found this out before I finished my test code, so I'm off the hook already, but it was good to have piece of mind haha!

So... Yesterday I ordered a meal and it had whole jalapenos in it. I didn't order jalapeños. I love the taste but I hate toilet visits after. Hence, was putting them aside. But then I got into that new code, jumping around this new project I'll be working on. We were getting intimate. I liked the architecture, I liked it a lot - it was using event sourcing and respected CQRS. Suddenly I realised I ate everything. Including jalapeños. And the only reason I noticed is because I was eating with my hands. And my eye got watery. And I wiped it.

So, yeah. Yesterday for the first time in my life I was pouring milk into my eyes. Does this count as a proper dev rant? I don't know. Fuck the protein interface that can't process simple food orders, though.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

!rant && !!happiness;

I told you some times ago that I was almost fired then put in a new position as tester: my goal is to test if the functionality asked by the client works the way it should.

Today, after 3 months of doing this only, I got to speak with the lead developer, who pretty much saved my ass back then, and told me that not only he was pleased by my work, but he looked at the code I did and liked the organization I set up to handle multiple projects in one folder (trust me, it was INSANE), but he was also genuinely happy about how I'm training the new dude.

And pretty much suddenly, he told me that my logic and knowledge about development was better than some of the colleagues who were there 2 years before I started, I just needed a bit of work to make people forget about what happened in January.

Life is currently fucking good, it's almost sad I have nothing to rant about 😊😊

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

(inspired by another rant I read here)

Last semester we were learning Java in the Programming Fundamentals class and a friend of mine asked for help with an assignment.

The objective was to make a virtual store (as a console app) in which the user would be able to select a few products, customize some of them and then the program would print out a receipt, with a list of all products, their prices, and the total cost.

Simple enough I thought, but there was a catch: you were not allowed to use arrays because the teacher hadn't taught that to the class yet. So I was like "how the fuck are you supposed to do this then?". Turns out the way to do it was to just append text to a string in order to generate the receipt. This is stupidly simple, so stupid that it didn't even cross my mind.

It's just that it's an awful way to architecture your code, it's just plain shit. Sure, if you're learning programming that's completely ok, but using that code on production is just completely unfeasible and I think that's why it didn't even cross my mind to do it this way. I'm just constantly worrying about performance and good code architecture and organization that the simplest of all solutions slipped my mind. When I finally discovered the way the teacher wanted us to do it I just wanted to kill myself...

Short angry rant
What the fuck is wrong with the SalesForce Authenticator logic?! How in the hell do you fuck up a simple 2FA system this hard?!!

Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing... -> Reload Page -> Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing -> Click "Use Code instead"... nothing happens... -> Reload Page -> "Login -> don't even wait for notification and just pres "Use Code instead"... nothing -> Reload Page -> Notice there's a "Use Code" button on this page as well -> Finally be able to log into the fucking Aloha piece of shit...

How TF is it, that Duo is able to send me a push notification within 1 second and it ALWAYS works... and THIS FUCKING SHIT NEVER FUCKING WORKS THE FIRST TIME AND AT WORST JUST DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!!!!

Fucking hell.... Don't offer me a push notification service if you don't know how to make one... jesus fucking christ... All of Salesforce security is fucking stupid, but at least the others mostly work, but this retarded piece of crap is making me actively surprised when it works on first try... Maybe it's because I'm on a slow connection, but again Duo Mobile doesn't have this problem and works *instantly*... so what sort of retarded monkey coded the SF one I don't know, but I hope they are making better products now, because this is a disgrace to programming and security

Rant rant rant!

Le me subscribe to website to buy something.

Le register, email arrives immediately.
*please not my password as clear text, please not my password as clear text *

Dear customer your password is: ***

You dense motherfucker, you special bread of idiotic asshole its frigging 2017 and you send your customer password in an email!???

They frigging even have a nice banner in their website stating that they protect their customer with 128bit cryptography (sigh)

Protect me from your brain the size of a dried pea.

Le me calm down, search for a way to delete his profile. Nope no way.
Search for another shop that sells the good, nope.
Try to change my info: nope you can only change your gender...

Get mad, modify the html and send a tampered form: it submits... And fail because of a calculation on my fiscal code.

I wanna die, raise as a zombie find the developers of that website kill them and then discard their heads because not even an hungry zombie would use that brains for something.

I am reviewing a piece of code as I type this, and I just had to make a rant about it. In the code there's all these measures for syncing multiple threads, while the entire thing runs does not even use threading. But that's not the worst: when an InterruptedException is caught, is calls Platform.exit() WHICH CLOSES THE FUCKING PROGRAM. WHY WOULD YOU EVER DO THAT?

An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.

Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:

HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);

And magic happened! The output was:

{1=1, 2=, 3=a}

That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.

I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

Ok this is a weird story.

So myself and two friends were working on a chrome extension several years ago, probably late high school/early college years.

So before any of us had seen the ballmer peak xkcd, I had discovered it on my own. I was telling my friend that we should start drinking because a)it's Saturday night, and b) I code better buzzed. So he decided to push the limits. He poured my drink super heavy, then another, then didn't finish his and insisted I did. He ended up getting me super drunk. I started going off on how they were doing it wrong, then took over the keyboard. What I wrote cannot even be considered code. I went on an incoherent rant, puked in a trash can, and then woke up in the bathroom with a towel as a pillow.

And that's the story of why my friends are convinced the ballmer peak is definitely not a thing.

Hi guys!

I never thought that this day will come, be here is my first rant with a big dose of frustration.

So, I'm working on the API team of one of ower products and a coworker that works on the webapp has a lot of problems (don't want to be mean, but he has problems like 'i can't catch a 404 http status, please send a 200 with a message' ) and he always go and wines about the API and that he can't do his job because the API is faulty...

But it is not the case, every functionality of the API is well tested and it works as it should.

So, tonight I was the only one left from my team and the project manager comes and
starts asking me about why I am returning http status codes with all my responses, how the login works and other stuff like that...

Just wasted more than an hour to prove that all the code that I wrote works as expected...

Hi everyone, I’m new here and this is also my first rant.

I’m in the job hunting boat once again and I’ve been looking at Junior front-end positions. I thought I’d rant about something that always annoys me when looking through the requirements.

Wait, so in order to land a Junior front-end job, I have to be a freshly graduated person with a Master’s degree in CS, with a minimum of 3 years working experience and all that just to come code in HTML, CSS and JS?

For the love of god, I’m one person damn it. It’s not like I’m a self-taught developer that taught myself those things and more in a shorter period of time after quitting college.

On a more serious note, I’m not by any means claiming that I know everything, but having a CS Master’s degree for these types of positions is clearly ridiculous in my opinion.
Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these things are making it up as they go or whether they’re actually serious.

I don't know if this is exactly a rant. But - I am sure somewhere out there has run into this situation before.

I've been a developer (professionally) for a 3 years. And in that time I've stayed with that same company.

Over that time its become incredibly apparent that my boss (senior developer) isn't exactly keen on new technologies, source control (I had to push hard for this. And even then he doesn't use it properly), or any kind of project management. It's only he and I.

I've started interviewing other places and while I have no problems answering their technical questions. I'm worried my lack of experience in a team is becoming a problem.

We don't work on projects together. We don't do code reviews. He does not ask my opinion on anything. We are basically two separate teams. I want to improve as a developer. I love the rest of the company and I enjoy what I'm working on. I just feel I'm hindering my growth as a developer.

Anyone have any advice? I know I can find a project to contribute to on github or something. But honestly that's intimidating to me for some reason. I am self taught. And don't have any experience in working with teams.

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

//First rant

So I've been working trying to get a file exporter for a binary file format mostly reverse engineered - 2001 Super Monkey Ball 2 (GameCube) if anyone's interested.

Everything works fine, goals show up in the right places, wormholes work as intended, etc. That is everything, except every single level you create will be invisible, or crash (Depending on which version of Dolphin emu you use).

This happens whenever trying to specify object names for 3D objects. I checked, all the many offsets seem correct, Object names are correct. Tried both null terminated strings and fixed 80 character strings - nothing.

Some other guy also made an exporter that works, however the code is an absolute mess - basically unreadable. It also lacks some newer parts of the file spec, which is the main reason as to why I'm rewriting it.

And as I'm working with an almost entirely unheard of file format, there are few people to go to for help. The 2 I know who are also familiar with the LZ file format have no idea either...

Sigh.

First rant here..

So earlier this week, on a php Laravel project, I created a set of nice new features.

The code is tested, locally all fine, I push to Github, circleCi kicks in and double checks myself, still everything green. (Just for a not, its a private project so only I work on it.)

I go ahead and merge, deploy to staging and continue on my next ticket, which is a very small one.

I call it the day, next day I pick back up where I left, test locally, all green, push... then circleCi says no.

I spend 2 days debugging, trying to figure out what is wrong without advance. I just push develop branch again, guess what also failing.

I leave it for the day as I already spend enough time on it.

This morning, I simply do a composer update, push and everything miraculously starts working.. even if there were no changes in the working branches.

Im so mad right now, and this is going in my "try this before you debug a ci" book..

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

As my friend @AlexDeLarge found my last rant less detailed and idiotic so I deleted that rant and am writing this new rant giving all the possible details.

I am currently doing my graduation in computer science(in 3rd year). I love to code problems and have an experience of working in various languages like c, c++, java, javascript, html, css, python, swift. When I came into this field, I had a dream of becoming an iOS developer but now seeing all those streams out there(android, machine learning and etc etc), I am really confused. I know that I want to do programming but choosing a career is getting on my nerves and taking the hell outta me. So if anyone of you following devRanters could guide me and help me on this point, I would be highly grateful.

P.S- please don't judge me cause i know i am not good at expressing myself.

!rant

When you inherit some code from the job student and you notice how well written and commented it is. I'm glad he is soon returning as a fulltime employee. Hope he will keep this up.

context: I'm sort of a self-deprecating guy and I really don't look for validation.

So, i decided to fuck it. I tried to provide the best decisions in terms of money-wise/biz-wise but apparently this guys rather choose what he believes is best for the code... (he knows shit of coding and that's coming from someone who is not a software engineer but rather a physicist who happens to code).
So, now i let him make all decisions. no opinion from me. a few things are going to shit because of him... fuck it. i had it. as long as I get paid. fuck him.

this is probably common... sorry for the rant.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

!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?

never before have I been happy to be asked to work overtime, but for once, fuck yeah...

Bit of back story, I am tech lead on a massive project that has been run like a complete shit show, the PM who also happens to be the brains behind the project seems to think we are miracle workers and for the first 9/10 months of the project would make significant, like delete a weeks worth of code and start over changes, 3-5 times per week. There are features for the v1 release that have been built in excess of 5 times. I have been saying since October that even without all his constant changes, we will NOT make the deadline, and naturally as is part of my job I argued against every unnecessary feature he tried to implement, eventually he pulled me into a meeting to tell me how much he values my opinion, I need to stop arguing with him and he does not want to work with yes men (I have a rant about that convo already).

I believe our CEO finally started smelling a rat as he insisted on joining our daily stand-ups, during which said PM scripted some lovely stories to disguise the fuckup we are in, and since has assigned another PM to take over and do proper project management and risk analysis.

That is where the email comes in, a lot of the work assigned to me will miss the deadline by a month, honestly I am impressed that it is by so little and so few people will not be missing it, but anyway, he probably spun a few stories there too.

So I spent part of the work compiling the most perfect surgical response as not not actively throw him under the bu, but create a quite a few questions that they hopefully as, as himself and the CEO where cc'd into the mail.

And the jist is, the deadline itself was still impossible and 8 of the 10 tasks assigned to be have ZERO back-end whatsoever, and those tasks are about 80/90% integration to said non-existent back-end, some of those services and data structures have not even been planned yet and we are a week past the deadline and 3 weeks from the just as useless extension.

!rant :) FUUUUUUUUDGE YEAAAAH!
it's so satisfying when you've been working on a huge ass thing(when maybe you should have tested individual parts) and it just fucking works as intended amazing, I love it!

It's so beautiful to see your own compiler(jk just scanner+parser atm) compile code successfully

!rant
Recently I started to be interested in how code actually work. I do a for-loop or an if-statement but how do they actually work at the lowest level.

Another thing I've been interested in is security. I thought about learning how to hack my own systems in order to learn how to write more secure code and keep people out. But I'm a little afraid that as soon as I start look at how to hack, the police will storm through the window and take my computer 😂😂

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

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

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

Let me take an example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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