Code reuse.

A programmer and a business analyst are sitting in the break room one day eating lunch when suddenly the microwave catches fire. Thinking quickly, the analyst leaps up, unplugs the microwave, grabs the trash can, fills it with water from sink, and dumps the water on the microwave to put out the flames.

A few weeks later the two are again having lunch in the break room when suddenly the coffee maker bursts into flames. The programmer leaps up, grabs the coffee maker, shoves it into the microwave oven, and then hands the trash can to the business analyst, thus re-using the solution developed for the previous project.

One of my worst meetings, as the sheer rage was unbelievable.

Backstory:
Architect: "Stop duplicating code", "stop copy pasting code", "We need to reuse code more", "We need to look at a new pattern for unit tests" etc.

Meeting:
Architect: What did you want to talk about?

Me: I built a really simple lightweight library to solve a lot of our problems. Its built to make unit testing our code much easier, devs only need to change a small bit of how they work.

Architect: I like the pattern a lot, looks great ... but why a library? can we not just copy the code from project to project?

... do you have a twin or something?

When you reuse code...

Came across this on 9gag. I'm hoping it's not a repost here.

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

Haha perfect contradiction

So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.

(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)

So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.

Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.

Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.

A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.

Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!

'coz you know ...

Colleagues sharing passwords.That was a big fat NO when I was a sysadmin - and for a good reason. But now, since I'm closer to development, it feels like no one really cares about the passwords. If I tell my colleague I'll take 10 minutes more because I can't log in, he OFFERS me his credentials. And sends them over saying "in case you need it". [the next day the same colleague was complaining his account is locked out. Oh, wonders! How on Earth...!]

But seriously, password sharing is a serious problem. I would fire the person on spot if I caught him sharing his credentials! This is the 8th deadly sin! IDC if they are for non-prod. Most people reuse their passwords in multiple systems, and even non-prod envs can bring the prod down! Or worse - install a trojan.

When you're too busy ranting...

There is code reuse and then there is stupidity. This npm module has 4 dependents and 2 dependencies.

My boss now has me writing an angular app but I'm not allowed to reuse components. The retard level is over 9000

Boss: don't worry about the architecture, it's an one-off project, just make it work...

2 months later...

Boss: hey, remember that one-off project? we need to add in a few more features... Also can we reuse that code for this new one-off project we have to do for this new client?

Found a post by G.R. on Linkedln:
"A lazy programmer is also often a good programmer:

- Writes little code to achieve the goal
- Automates all boring jobs
- He does not develop things he does not know yet
- Sleeps at night, then make sure that if the shutdown occurs, the system will restart
- He knows he forgets things, then writes readable and not cryptic code
- Try to reuse what he did
- He does not like copy-paste (too boring to keep)

It takes training to be lazy"

Love this quote

"Don't reinvent the wheel..." - I read it often, still I hate to use foreign code. It's not only that I do it for learning purposes. I just don't trust them. I want to keep the control, I want to understand my application and I want to be to blame when things fuck up.
I would probably through my laptop if my website gets hacked because of some fucking plugin or code I found somewhere on the internet.

So yes, I will invent the wheel new. At least I will spent some time to understand how this particular wheel is made, how it rolls and how I can improve it for my specific situation.

Sometimes my tires have some uncommon profile, but they fit to the stuff they are made for.

I have just thought of the perfect solution when support for fucking ancient IE versions creaps in the requirements (and asking the assholes to produce numbers to support the crazy does not help)

Just do browser detection and if IE < 9 Replace body with one of those winXP alert boxes that tell them there Computer is infected and that they can get a free scan (it's what they are used to anyway). Put a link to the installer of your favourite browser over the entire image.😎

Good news is 100℅ code reuse! Works on every outdated IE and every website that requires IE support.

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

I'll kill if I see the "dont reuse password, we don't pay our devs enough" meme again!

The quality of my code and how often people reuse may be directly correlated to how shit it is.

Just finished up my first compiler, with accurate extensible error reporting, and the syntax system is generically typed so I can reuse it. Pretty fucking pleased with myself

How to use your old hardware

700 years ago, some monk scraped down the ink from a book, so he could reuse it to write down his stupid prayers.

Recent analysis uncovered that the book he scraped was “Method” by Archimedes that outlined the basics of calculus 1000 years before Leibniz.

It makes me feel miserable and helpless when I think how more advanced our world would be if it didn’t happen. I realize he probably didn’t go like “hehehehe I’m erasing scientific knowledge because religion is better”, and just did what he thought was better, but I feel bad nonetheless.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Self rant!

Looked at a code snippet I wrote last year and I thought to myself: am I geting stupid for not understanding my own code ?

Tried to re build it from scratch...

Failed and had to reuse it without understanding how it's working.

I guess I am getting stupid!

I wanted to contribute to open source but don't have the time due to a client project.

So what I did was develop an open source library, uploaded it as a public repo, then use that on our client project.

As a bonus, I can reuse that library for similar projects. Haha!

Found this little gem in the AMD64 reference manual:

"When PCIDs are enabled the system software can store 12-bit PCIDs in CR3 for different address spaces. Subsequently, when system software switches address spaces (**by writing the page table base pointer in CR3[62:12]**), the processor **may use TLB mappings previously stored for that address space and PCID**".

later:

"Updates to the CR3 register cause the entire TLB to be invalidated except for global pages."

So let me get this straight: PCIDs allow you to reuse TLB entries (instead of flushing the entire TLB) when writing a new address space to CR3 but writing to CR3 always flushes the entire TLB anyways

Just why 🤦‍♂️

Excerpts from "Bastard devops from hell" checklist:

- Insistently pronounce git with a soft "G" and refuse to understand people not using that pronunciation, the same goes for jithub, jitlab, jit lfs, jitkraken etc.

- Reject all pull requests not in haiku format, suggest the author needs to be more culturally open minded when offending.

- increment version numbers ONLY based on percentage code changed: Less than 1% patch increment, less than 5% minor increment, more than that major version increment.

- Cycle ALL access keys, personal tokens, connection strings etc. every month "for security reasons"

- invent and only allow usage of your own CI/CD language, for maximum reuse of course. Resist any changes to it after first draft release

Hate how UX gets under valued... as it determines how many users will reuse / buy / recommend your product / website.

Why the fuck do managers think beacuse a component has been build by another developer a shit ton of time ago, we can still reuse that fucking code.

For fucks sake, I had to rebuild a whole fucking map component that needed contextual filter and the fuckers just add extra functionality without consulting me. And gave me a tight schedule bc the customer, who btw disappeared for 6 months, will be mad for wasting his precious fucking time.

Fuck these clients.

So this phallus decided to make my day a night mare, I coded the Interface in separate class for each distinct services, He just told me to re write it to one class, before he don't understand it.

I wrote documentation, he said it is not professional. and now the fucking codes are containing redundancies.

For instance if he use my method, all he need is call my function once, and call it everywhere. But now the code is messy as fuck, calling the same thing over and over again which can be done by separate it to a function once, and reuse it.

Making my own game console.

I work with FPGAs and have access to a bunch of pretty nice dev boards, so building a workable CPU and GPU is definitely possible. I even have architectures for both in mind, and have planned ways to get compiler support (i.e. just use RISC-V as the ISA as much as possible so that I can reuse an existing RISC-V compiler with minimal changes) so that I don't need to write assembly.

But, lack of time. Sigh.

I'm in a place where running npm install takes up to 10mins, so I reuse the node_modules folder.😅

"How much of a dev are you, if you use other peoples work and just glue it together?" I once asked a friend who really loves npm and everything.

I know about code reuse and maintainability and all that but geez we had a long discussion..😅

I actually do have one. 2 years ago I found myself in a stressful situation. It lasted for an hour or so but all ended well. Ever since that incident I was wondering what should be different so that situations like these could be avoided. I had an idea. I began making sketches, sorting out the architecture I'd need and then it hit me. Shit, I could reuse this very principle for a MUCH larger scale! And in fact there's noone in the market offering this yet! There are similar products, products that offer a tiny part of my idea's functionality, but none of them are even close to what I have in mind!

And so the coding began. I was still a student back then. And employed 12hrs/day. And married. Needless to say I did not have much time for coding. Now I'm also a father (although not a student any more!) which makes my schedule even worse.

All in all I've made quite a few widely reusable libraries by now which have saved me 10s of thousands of lines typing, had yet another idea on alternative TLS which seems impossible to crack (well okay, possible. But there's a twist - cracker will not be able to know he cracked the algo :) ). Now I'm close to 100k LOC of my main project and struggling with a fucking FE (since I'm more of a bkend guy). FE's already taken a few months from me and I'm still in a square 1 :/ But I'm moving forward. Slowly, but moving. Frustrated af, but not giving up.

I had a sort of a dream to start my project before I'm 30. I have less than a year left. Still doable. This project, if it's sucessful, has a potential to become extremely popular as it offers solutions to multiple problems we have today. This project should save me from 9-to-5 work every day where, no matter how great the environment is, I feel trapped. But I need money to survive in this city . With my family.
This project should be a solution to all of my problems and probably something great the world could enjoy.

I wish I could make it. I really do. I don't want to be 9-5 any more. I don't want to be dictated what's my schedule, what's that I have to do now. what to think. I want to be free of all of this. Have enough time to live. To travel, see the world. Live in a house (God I miss living in a house....). Spend time with my family. Show my lil boy what a wonderful thing the World is!

I really want this to work. I want to be free again. And I wish I hadn't to deal with FrontEnd.

Allright, enough wabbling. Time for a nice cup of tea and back to coding. "The next big thing" is not going to create itself while I'm ranting, right?

I’ve come to the conclusion that developers who like react have never used it for anything even remotely complicated.

Because here’s reacts dirty little secret; it doesn’t scale. Not even a little. It’s flexible, but that leads to every developer writing their code in a different way.

It’s simple and easy for simple side projects, but as soon as you have to pass state to a child component, you’re fucked. And god help you if you’re modifying the state in said child component. You can try using redux, but that’s a bandaid solution to the real issue.

There are better alternatives, namely Vue. There’s no need to write unintelligible code that’s a mutated hybrid of html css and js. We as web developers realized mixing these technologies was a bad idea a long time ago.

React simply doesn’t scale. It’s flexibility, complexity, and the awful code quality it leads to makes it a nightmare for large projects with multiple developers

Some of its concepts are interesting and useful though. It’s functional concepts allow for easy code reuse, among the other benefits associated with functional programming

I sincerely hope that the hype around react dies out, and a new framework emerges that takes the best from react and fixes the glaring issues it currently has

Customer:"Adjust my application so it stops automtically when it encounters a file that has already been processed".
I do the adjustments. Two days later I get a mail from that customer. I'm not lying: "Hey, my application stops when I try to reuse my files"... the people you sometimes have to put up with...

That one time a Brazilian got into ny GitHub account.

Don't reuse passwords kids!

People who reuse variables.
Yeah, sure, let's just go declare
number1 = g * 86;
Oh and 10 lines down let's reset it
number1 = 0;
I WILL FIND YOU. I WILL DESTROY YOUR SMALL RAM 'ed THING YOU CALL YOUR COMPUTER.
Variables should be made for one purpose and one purpose only.

Product manager calls me at 7 PM. "There's gonna be a slight change in the module. You can reuse lot of existing code and I'm sure it won't take much for you to finish. "

Me: Okay, let me take a look at it tomorrow morning.

The next day I saw the spec change.

One and half weeks later, I'm still doing the change.

#FML

That moment when code reuse makes you reuse reused code and you actually reuse a BUG.

You decide to go for code reusing when your boss asks: "Can you add an edit popup besides that 'add customer' popup button?". You do some little tweaks to the "new customer" code and it allows that to save over an existing entry, cool.

However, after a lot of time spent on reviewing the resulting PR, turns out there was a dormant bug on the code you reused, and it woke up with its new use.

That code was a bad copy-pasta from another, bigger form, which included a whole bunch of optional fields. As it was only used to save new entries, those now missing fields were simply being saved as empty. But as you reused that to save existing entries, you were now cleaning up all those optional fields without noticing.

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

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

Something that really bothers me about the oop idea of "oop allows better code reuse" is the fact that I have yet to encounter a situation where I need to reuse old code for a new project.

And the code I do want to reuse I've put into a library and made genetic anyway. Something which can easily be done with any language supporting generic programming, object oriented or otherwise.

IKEA small Filur container might be the best IKEA product ever produced. Why?

- it's ridiculously compact for its volume
- it fits the standard grocery bag just perfectly allowing you to reuse old grocery bags as trash bags
- when closed, it creates almost airtight seal without using any gaskets
- it's absolutely overbuilt and ridiculously strong

Why is it so strong? You see, the wall thickness along doesn't matter, but the wall thickness to volume ratio does. If you decide to build a house with the same wall thickness out of same material, it would collapse under it's own weight.

But the wall thickness to volume ratio of this very container allows it to be possibly the strongest IKEA product ever. As a matter of fact, the walls could be three times thinner also rendering the container perfectly usable. Also, this kind of plastic bends but doesn't break. Also, the lid alone has 38 FUCKING stiffening ribs.

Also I like the color and the office vibe the whole thing radiates.

Totally get your hands on one. You won't regret it.

But am still confused, is it ok in terms of good design.
Reusing existing code.

that feeling when you reuse a compoinent you wrote 1 year ago and all bizzare magic still applies and everything just works as expected.

My first task in my current company, a few years ago.

I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.

There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.

This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.

Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.

As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.

I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.

But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-)

The wonderful feeling when i need to implement new functionality but it only takes a few minutes bc I actually created a framework that I can reuse instead of writing duct tape code from scratch 😎😊😆😙

Todays story: conversation between me and my brain about a app that i have planned for a long while.

The application is just a huge, specyfic json editor/manager for a game that i like. The game uses json files to determine unit charactetistics. So in order to make modding easier i want to make a tool for that that is fancier and easier to use than a notepad.

Brain> Lets make a app that allows you to mod the game easier!
Me> Good idea. How would you want to make it?
Brain> Lets use C# cause you main that lang currently and you have experience with json parser lib.
Me> That is true. So what do you wanna implement first?
Brain> Oh. I have thought about it before! I want to implement: (10 000 features) and maybe few more later!
Me> It sounds like a infinity project, shouldnt you implement like 1 or 2 features at first and then jump to other ones?
Brain> Yes... but i dont wanna refactor those features latter so let just implement them all at once!
Me> Dammit brain! Let just implement just one feature now! Like a simple json editor. You can use inhieritance to reuse the code later.
Brain> Ok...
* Starts with that one feature but one day later starts coding 6 more *
* Cant publish the app yet, the code looks like shit, gui is unfinished because brain wanted only to test those 6 unfinished features without propely implementing them *
Me> Brain WTF! You said that you are going to focus on one feature at the time!
Brain> I got carried a bit...
Me> ...
Me> Ok. I understand. Let just refactor the code and clean the project out of those unfinished features.
Brain> No. I have a depression now...
Me> FUCK.

* 2 month passes by without any progress on ANY of my projects*

current day

Brain> I still have depression...
Me> Ok i dont care about that anymore! Tell me something that i dont know!
Brain> Oh I have good news as well!
Me> ???
Brain> What about the home server that is going to store all mods made by the users so they can share it? It would be a good practice with networking!
Me> * Gives up *

Don't reuse your fixtures!

Each test case should be isolated. Don't ever think just because some function requires a similar input, it's safe to reuse it ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Why? Because someday, you want to change one functionality of one unit.

And you adapt your tests, fix your code, and suddenly, by changing one fixture, you break dozens if not hundreds of unrelated tests and now you have to clean up that mess.

It's even worse for functional tests with all those interwoven parts so that it becomes hard to reason about the scope of your tests when lacking proper documentation.

How I know? BECAUSE I AM CLEANING UP YOUR MESS RIGHT NOW!

Merge VS Rebase:
- Did you pick a side?
- Practical tips? Like dealing with merge conflicts
- Have you ever regretted using either?

My answer
* My team squash-merges all branches to master so we don't really care what the branch history looks like. Master history should be pretty - but a branch history can be ugly and filled with a dozen commits.
* Practical tip 1: use `git config rerere.enabled true`. rerere stands for "reuse recorded resolution" and this means if you rebase often you don't have to resolve the same merge conflict twice.
* Practical tip 2: use `git commit --fixup oldcommithash` and then rebase with `--autosquash`
* I like using Rebase. But I have regretted the amount of time I've spent on trying to rebase old branches with many commits only to give up and to `git rebase --abort` since I realised I couldn't handle trying to reapply all the commits chronogically as the changes in the 1st commit were no longer relevant.

Winter break university projects:

Option A: implement writing and reading floating point decimals in Assembly (with SSE)

Option B: reuse the reading and writing module from Option A, and solve a mathematical problem with SSE vectorization

Option C: Research the entirety of the internet to actually understand Graphs, then use Kruskal's algorithm to decide that a graph is whole or not (no separated groups) - in C++

Oh, and BTW there's one week to complete all 3...

I don't need life anyways...

Most of 2020 was a bad dev experience for me. I was paid to remake a system because it was

a ) insecure
b ) inconsistent
c ) hard to mantain (spaghetti code)

I thought I could focus on the backend and just reuse the front end but even that was unusable.

Basically had to redo it from scratch and since I made the fatal mistake of letting THEM estimate how long it would take, I worked most of the year instead of just 2-3 months.

Never again. After being done with the project I still had to be 'reachable' for the coming weeks if anything happened.

I turned off my phone during one weekend and then the next thing I know the only other dev at that small company is asking me for details on the project (meaning they just decided to offload everything to him). Never heard from them again and I'm hoping that won't change.

Beware small dev companies with less than 5 actual devs.

Best: Dev wise this year has been bad or not-bad but nothing 'great' comes to mind.

My fun times and enjoyments were not derived from dev activities.

If you use ID selectors in a stylesheet for a component you reuse in the page multiple times you should be shot.

After days of cleaning and recycling I recovered a storage area filled of old stuff.
This is now my storage area...

It's hard to teach git to a beginner! There's just so many bits of info that you have to know before it clicks into place. Not to mention git's "reuse" of certain commands with files and refs.

Oh ffs, just fucking inject a chip into my finger already for authentication purposes, you can track my every fucking move if you so wish. When a web page like twitch uses 2FA it boggles my mind because its a page where you're watching some fucking videos.

"hey there, so out of the blue, we send you a code to your email, we won't tell you which so good luck. Also, you cannot copy paste this code because we did that fucking thing where each character has its own textbox"

Of course, this is only because we are dumb enough to reuse shitty passwords. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

Got that old mid 2011 MBA and just put Ubuntu 20.04 on it. Tried 18 on it before but didn't really feel right. 20 works great though.

I love it when I can reuse old hardware I have laying around and it works out of the box.😁

Will use it for entertainment purposes, movies, music etc.

Went to steal a tool from my father's office. That was 3 hours ago..
Didn't find the tool (more labels for a label machine, I'm marking everything), still found lots more stuff, filled the space in my office that took me a week to open and now I have like days off stuff to unmount, reuse,... And didn't find the fucking labels...

Non tech hobbies that helped me with developement:

Lego technic/mecano/knex were a great way to learn about abstraction, you build modules that you can reuse somewhere else.

Cooking is similar, you notice useful patterns that you can reproduce. E.g. roux, which is butter and flour is used for a lot of sauces, then add milk and you get béchamel, which is again used for a lot of sauces.

Coffee brewing helps because I can't focus if I don't get coffee.

For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.

You have your favourite dev stickers on your first laptop and now you get another laptop, fucking can't reuse it!! Gonna miss it !

Any website to get stickers in India?

The Zen Of Ripping Off Airtable:
(patterned after The Zen Of Python. For all those shamelessly copying airtables basic functionality)

*Columns can be *reordered* for visual priority and ease of use.

* Rows are purely presentational, and mostly for grouping and formatting.

* Data cells are objects in their own right, so they can control their own rendering, and formatting.

* Columns (as objects) are where linkages and other column specific data are stored.

* Rows (as objects) are where row specific data (full-row formatting) are stored.

* Rows are views or references *into* columns which hold references to the actual data cells

* Tables are meant for managing and structuring *small* amounts of data (less than 10k rows) per table.

* Just as you might do "=A1:A5" to reference a cell range in google or excel, you might do "opt(table1:columnN)" in a column header to create a 'type' for the cells in that column.

* An enumeration is a table with a single column, useful for doing the equivalent of airtables options and tags. You will never be able to decide if it should be stored on a specific column, on a specific table for ease of reuse, or separately where it and its brothers will visually clutter your list of tables. Take a shot if you are here.

* Typing or linking a column should be accomplishable first through a command-driven type language, held in column headers and cells as text.

* Take a shot if you somehow ended up creating any of the following: an FSM, a custom regex parser, a new programming language.

* A good structuring system gives us options or tags (multiple select), selections (single select), and many other datatypes and should be first, programmatically available through a simple command-driven language like how commands are done in datacells in excel or google sheets.

* Columns are a means to organize data cells, and set constraints and formatting on an entire range.

* Row height, can be overridden by the settings of a cell. If a cell overrides the row and column render/graphics settings, then it must be drawn last--drawing over the default grid.

* The header of a column is itself a datacell.

* Columns have no order among themselves. Order is purely presentational, and stored on the table itself.

* The last statement is because this allows us to pluck individual columns out of tables for specialized views.

*Very* fast scrolling on large datasets, with row and cell height variability is complicated. Thinking about it makes me want to drink. You should drink too before you embark on implementing it.

* Wherever possible, don't use a database.
If you're thinking about using a database, see the previous koan.

* If you use a database, expect to pick and choose among column-oriented stores, and json, while factoring for platform support, api support, whether you want your front-end users to be forced to install and setup a full database,
and if not, what file-based .so or .dll database engine is out there that also supports video, audio, images, and custom types.

* For each time you ignore one of these nuggets of wisdom, take a shot, question your sanity, quit halfway, and then write another koan about what you learned.

* If you do not have liquor on hand, for each time you would take a shot, spank yourself on the ass. For those who think this is a reward, for each time you would spank yourself on the ass, instead *don't* spank yourself on the ass.

* Take a sip if you *definitely* wildly misused terms from OOP, MVP, and spreadsheets.

I was looking for alternatives of MC that are atleast usable, and found a thing called Minetest. This apparently is a Voxel Engine/Scriptable game, where you create games, that consist of mods/modules and other resources.
The cool part of it is, that mods and games etc. get handled by the game itself in a package manager type fashion, so the only thing you as a user have to do is selecting them in the ui, and putting them into your world.
It's this easy because the content is managed by a content database. This engine is built with multiplayer support by default.

Now comes the interesting part: apparently a few devs sat together and made a whole MC clone in this engine, and have called it Mineclone 2. I was testing it recently on a server and have to say, that it doesn't appear to be some low effort clone, but to my surprise is an actual playable and nicely looking game. So far i'm having fun with playing and even modding it.

Since the core is written in C++ and the mods and games content is written in LUA, you can easily writte new stuff for it, and even look at other mods stuff, to find out how to make it compatible or how to do certain things. The licenses usually allows to reuse and redistribute.

If you're looking for something like that, give Minetest + Mineclone2 a spin.

Hmm .. hmm...
I get it now ...
In time you will know what it's like to switch ..
Use it , reuse it .. destiny still arrives .

Thinking of turning my 6 year old intel atom processor netbook into sth useful other than just dumping it.
Any good suggestions to reuse?

So, idk if I told you guys yet but I'm a web dev intern.
Recently the company I work at doubled in size and so this was the result...
Here's what my weekend looked like:

Friday:
0830: Math exam at school
1005: Get on the public transportation
1100: Arrived at internship
1130: Get started on setting up 8 new PC's
/*realize I have to do them one by one, clean window installation, office, updates, and some random software. Internet connection sucks, so one PC at a time it is.*/
2130: bus ride home.

Saturday:
0900: Get on public transportation to work
1000: Arrive and start finishing up PC's
1600: Start moving old pc's to new room and install new pc's
2130: Get on bus ride home

Sunday:
0830: Get call from second job asking me to do some stuff.
1100: be done with second job
1400: Get on public transport to work
1500: start cleaning up old pc's for reuse
2130: Go home

And today we finished installing everything.

I've spend 17 hours of my weekend at internship. Guess who's taking Wednesday and Friday off?

REST apis. More than you think it is.

Just because you can access a resource by a uri, doesn't mean you have a good api.

Hypermedia that shit and let websites reuse your links from api responses, then we are getting somewhere.

Also, Fucking api versioning.. Learned the hard way that /v1/ doesn't mean Shit in most cases

promises in JavaScript have really spoiled me

it's the most optimal way to do async without leaving much on the table

there's a promises library in rust and the guy who wrote it says it sucks because it spawns new thread every time you execute a bunch of promises

and I finally, through my fogged brain, managed to get the bright idea to write what I want to make in rust in JavaScript and holy hell it's sexy to work with promises. there's no performance left on the table. you do things as fast as possible

but if I take this JavaScript usability code I made and make it possible syntax-wise in rust I don't see how I would be able to do it without starting new operating system threads every time I execute any promises (or set)

I can take the overhead hit but this sounds retarded

and this isn't even touching upon how in rust everything needs to have a predetermined data type. so you can do lambdas and capture variables and send in variables into a thread that way, but to return the return object must be a consistent type (synchronizing the order data was sent in to the data sent out aside, haven't written that yet should be fine though)

which is fine if you are making a threadpool and it'll all be returning one data type
but this means you can't reuse a threadpool you made elsewhere in the program

the only thing that could fix async is to literally be compiler-enabled. it would have to work like generics and automatically make an enum of every type that can return, and only then could you re-use the threadpool

When I first started reading about Angular 4 I must admit I was a bit excited. It seemed like it fit the company enterprise requirements. The improvements it offered on paper looked quite good for our use case. HOWEVER... After writing Angular 4 for two weeks I'm seriously doubting I made the right decision. Testing is a dependency hell and there are two ways to build and structure your application. The webpack way and the SystemJS way. The grunt way and the angular-cli way. For fuck sake Google. And the documentation is somewhat half supporting one thing, half supporting another. So when you're using angular-cli with webpack, you're pretty much screwed when we're talking about documentation. It has now taken me almost 50 hours to write a pretty basic Angular app, made it compliant with our staging environment and writing a Makefile for it, since I haven't been able to find any same way to provide custom arguments when building it with the angular-cli --aot option. So fuck you Google. Luckily I've found a way to modularize it so much that I'll be able to reuse the core in the future. So I guess I got that thing going for me, which is nice... -.-' *sigh*

I can't stand Swift's initializers. No other languages have the problem with constructors/initializers that Swift does. It's a complete failure of a feature and to hell with safety if it comes with this cost.

Just to illustrate how ridiculous it gets, I want to have a class where my initialization logic can be split among reusable parts. That is, the logic that initializes the class with no parameters has logic that I want to reuse in my other initializers. Simple DRY stuff. Well, the only way I can do that in Swift is if I use a convenience initializer that calls another one. But convenience initializers have completely different rules from designated initializers (again, something only Swift does).

For example, you can't access "self" until you call a designated initializer. You can't chain designated initializers, and if you want to chain anything in the same class you have to handcuff yourself by using a "convenience" initializer (there's nothing convenient about them, I might add).

So now I want to subclass my class and initialize myself using one of my superclass initializers. Oh but the one I want to call is a *convenience* initializer so I can't, unless I turn my new initializer into a convenience initializer. Except wait, a convenience initializer must delegate with self.init(), so it can't even call a superclass initializer!

And it just goes round and round and round. I don't know if I should try to convert all of my initializers to convenience initializers or the other way around.

Why all this nonsensical madness? Get rid of the distinction and go back to nice clean powerful initializers like Objective-C. I mean what does it have to take? This is a complete nightmare.

Worst: forced to work for 9 months on a shitty wp theme:
- colleague with no clue trying to make me do their work… check
- incompetent manager doing shit about it… check
- idiotic pipeline requiring to redeploy for every asset update… check
- micromanaging cto which for some fucking reason didn’t want to allow access to the writers, forcing the role of content editor on the devs… ducking check! Quack!!

Best: automated lots of processes in my free time, all stuff which I can reuse!

My big grievances when doing code reviews, lots of code reviews....

Constants. How difficult is to create constants files for reuse and readability?

Comments/java doc. I don't get any help by seeing this is an automatically generated block to get by check style.

*slap*

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP OVERUSING STYLES.XML IN ANDROID.

It is NOT A GOOD IDEA to create a new style for each and every layout and then RANDOMLY reuse those styles in RANDOM places.

Grep is working around the clock to solve this fucking hot mess you've made.

FFS

A sweaty furry sodomizing a dead dog would still be less disgusting than the codebase on which I have to work, some highlights are:
- The same class repeated 40 times with little variations instead of using some decent parametrization
- Inexistent encapsulation and separation of concerns, most changes requires to modify and recompile 2-3 indipendent Maven projects
- Abuse of inheritance which instead of being used to create "is-a" relationship as it should be it's used to reuse some methods of a class in another instead of using Spring dependency injection as we should be

It would be understandable in a 20 years old legacy projects but in something which started 2 months ago it drives me mad, I tried to fight to change it but in the big enterprise to which I'm "body-rented" it's impossible

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

Today I think it became apparent why we have so many data and prod issues...

No one understands SOLID design principals... Particularly Separation of Concern. No wonder all the Spring (DI) modules look like a mess of God functions that are impossible to reuse and difficult to extend...

When programmers try too hard to reuse everything that already exists on their code.

The new janitor lady keeps throwing away the water bottle on my desk after I leave.

I'm trying to be green here and she's making it quite frustrating... I guess I have to hide it from her.

There was a big hairy ball of SW mud from another project that a poor coworker had to "reuse". Only that it was impossible because there was no documentation, shit was partly auto-generated with mysterious Excel tables, and the actual code was just as bad. No APIs and nothing, just hacking shit into globals, several nested state machines that were overriding each other's states, and with global side effects. WTF.

Two devs took a look at it - minimum 8 weeks. Schedule was some days, and PM insisted that it was "already working". But the worst thing was that the dev in charge had been looking for another job anyway and quit, so the whole clusterfuck suddenly was on my desk.

The code was so awful that I could only bear it with both eyes closed, so I instead read the spec of this project closely. Turned out that it didn't actually demand this feature, only a small subset of what the ball of mud was supposed to achieve - which I was able to implement from scratch within a day, plus another one for documentation. Phew.

Fuck reuse, we should all take our repeatable code and manually repeat it everywhere it's needed so when we have to make a change we have to make sure we remember to change it in all the places and take hours to do a one line change.

...Also...fuck source control...

And they say I don't have fucks to give.

Fuck I feel fucked up just for completing user account management, authentication, email verification, password reset. Securing all of this with ssl and checking for any security loopholes.

I can't believe this took me more than a couple months.
Well I was lazy and unmotivated.
I fucking hate crafting stupid ass routes in nginx.
I fucking hate making a nice responsive gui.
I have to design even the stupid html for the emails. Fuuuuck.

So much boilerplate on top of that with username and email validation.

I learnt regex 5 times over the past couple months, still not enough.

And now I actually have to build the functional part.

On the plus side I can reuse this stupid boilerplate if I can make it more modular and readable.

There's shit ton of comments to the point where I feel like an idiot for including so much info. It's like I've written it for a toddler to take over.

Gawd. Anyways it's over now. 50% I guess.

I can finish the rest of the server more quickly and then spend another year designing the Android application.

I'm really lazy in places where I have to design UI/UX. Although at this point it's kinda what could put my application at the top. (I'm lazy, I ain't bad.. I just hate implementing my ideas I wish I could just visualize and have it appear on my screen)

I do like parts of gui that involve little math problems that would make motion smooth and efficient.

I prefer it doing 2 tasks parallely during the initial phase of requirement gathering and design phase.(makes more sense if you are working extremely new system and framework)
1. Keep collecting requirements from clients and understand them.
2. Collect different designing aspects for the project and parallely, build a POC for 2 purpose: to get hands into the new Framework and also as a demo to clients. Working on POC helps in 3 ways: Improving understanding of requirement, improving framework knowledge, and playing around with code whenever bored of designing and reading tons of existing designs..
3. Once primary requirements are clear and fixed, analyse all different designs, if possible I setup meetings with senior devs, principal engineers (they help a lot when it comes to reviews on scalability and reliability of a design)
4. The above design is mostly architectural level. Once design is fixed, then I start taking each component and prepare a detailed implementation design. (Notice that whenever I am bored of designing, I spend sometime in building POC)
5. In detail design, I focus on modularity and flexibility. Anything defined should have getters and setters for example. This will help you reuse your code. Keep the interface between components in your design as generic as possible, so that in case your MySQL is change to Postgre or NoSQL, your design should be able to adapt new features..
6. Instead of building entire project, define feature targets and deliver small features.. this will help you to be in line with the requirements with minimum deviation.

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

I want to make a game that collects a lot of questions for reuse and where players answer these one after another to make up the most dumb funny stories. Alas, it's in planning stage now.

Why all these SW engineer interviews include 2 days of questions about sophisticated algorithms which i have never (and probably will never) have chance to even reuse, because they are NOT simple & understandable for any project community? IMO It is like asking to show Assembler skills on frontend-dev interview...

I don't copy meme , I don't reuse codes.

--- Just Joking ^_^

Hey, flutterists! I'm getting curious.

Google gives me some hits, dunno how reliable they are. So here are my 2 questions:

1. Can I use flutter to develop for ios? Does the same code work on ios and droid?

2. Is there a way to use .jar libs in flutter? I have some custom tools I'd like to reuse.

As a dev, I have to reuse a lot of codes again and again. Some I've written, and some of them I found after stucking my head for 1 hour on StackOverflow.

Now, the problem is every time I need the code, I have to search again. Some of them I saved in note apps but organizing code snippets & finding them with a quick search is a mess.

I was thinking of building a code snippet organizer where developers can save code snippets in any language (have syntax highlighting), search quickly, share with anyone, create buckets, manage multiple accounts etc.

Let me know if it's a good idea or not. Would you be interested in using something like this? Is this even a real problem or it's just me?

I feel fucking stupid about using a custom node system at work. It is designed to generate an xml file for configuration. However, when using a node I cannot add more to the node unless the node has data. So I gotta call a function to inject useless XML into the node for it to not be empty. I literally set the internal data to <key></key>. It is stupid and I hate it. Just let me create my node hierarchy damn it!

Is this some weird data pattern I should know about? Like what does preventing adding data to an empty structure do? I have the root node. Is that not enough. Remember, this is custom node system that is probably fucking 20 years old. The previous coders did a lot of walled garden shit that I also hate. Prevents reuse of code. This code might just be more of that shit.

How I wish I can download and reuse my devRant avatar on other social networks. Even make a sticker out of it too!

#define AUDIOLB_EXIT_ON_ERROR(hres) \
if (FAILED(hres)) { goto Exit; }

#define AUDIOLB_SAFE_RELEASE(punk) \
if ((punk) != NULL) \
{ (punk)->Release(); (punk) = NULL; }

Looking through old audio code I wrote. Found these macros. Will most likely reuse for a new project. It works damnit!

Do you feel lucky?!

1/2 dev and a fair warning: do not go into the comments.
You're going anyway? Good.

I began trying to figure out how to use stable diffusion out of boredom. Couldn't do shit at first, but after messing around for a few days I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Writing long prompts gets tiresome, though. Think I can build myself a tool to help with this. Nothing fancy. A local database to hold trees of tokens, associate each tree to an ID, like say <class 'path'> or some such. Essentially, you use this to save a description of any size.

The rest is textual substitution, which is trivial in devil-speak. Off the top of my head:
my $RE=qr{\< (?<class> [^\s]+) \s+ ' (?<path>) [^'] '\>}x;

And then? match |> fetch(validate) |> replace, recurse. Say:
while ($in =~ $RE) {
my $tree=db->fetch $+{class},$+{path};
$in=~ s[$RE][$tree];
};

Is that it? As far the substitution goes, then yeah, more or less. We have to check that a tree's definition does not recurse for this to work though, but I would do that __before__ dumping the tree to disk, not after.

There is most likely an upper limit to how much abstraction can be achieved this way, one can only get so specific before the algorithm starts tripping balls I reckon, the point here is just reaching that limit sooner.

So pasting lists of tokens, in a nutshell. Not a novel idea. I'd just be making it easier for myself. I'd rather reference things by name, and I'd rather not define what a name means more than once. So if I've already detailed what a Nazgul is, for instance, then I'd like to reuse it. Copy, paste, good times.

Do promise to slay me in combat should you ever catch me using the term "prompt engineering" unironically, what a stupid fucking joke.

Anyway, the other half, so !dev and I repeat the warning, just out of courtesy. I don't think it needs to be here, as this is all fairly mild imagery, but just in case.

I felt disappointed that a cursed image would scare me when I've seen far worse shit. So I began experimenting, seeing if I could replicate the result. No luck yet, but I think we're getting somewhere.

Our mission is clearly the bronwning of pants, that much is clear. But how do we come to understand fear? I don't know. "Scaring" seems fairly subjective.

But I fear what I know to be real,
And I believe my own two eyes.

When you compare your past with your old code:

The improvements you could have made, if you had known what you know now.

A commit a day would have kept everything up to date.

A comment every now and then would have made choices understandable

Using classes would have made it easier to replace or reuse code.

Now you have to figure out what the code is supposed to do, and rewrite it.

How do you guys organize/save your codes, snippets, hints etc?
I already tried .txt file, bitbucket snippets, evernote

Sometimes I'm to lazy to properly abstract and reuse code, so I'll just copy & paste and then alter it - and then later curse myself about that. I'm working on this though...

Crypto. I've seen some horrible RC4 thrown around and heard of 3DES also being used, but luckily didn't lay my eyes upon it.
Now to my current crypto adventure.
Rule no.1: Never roll your own crypto.
They said.
So let's encrypt a file for upload. OK, there doesn't seem to be a clear standard, but ya'know combine asymmetric cipher to crypt the key with a symmetric. Should be easy. Take RSA and whatnot from some libraries. But let's obfuscate it a bit so nobody can reuse it. - Until today I thought the crypto was alright, but then there was something off. On two layers there were added hashes, timestamps or length fields, which enlarges the data to encrypt. Now it doesn't add up any more: Through padding and hash verification RSA from OpenSSL throws an error, because the data is too long (about 240 bytes possible, but 264 pumped in). Probably the lib used just didn't notify, silently truncating stuff or resorting to other means. Still investigation needed. - but apart from that: why the fuck add own hash verification, with weak non-cryptographic hashes(!) if the chosen RSA variant already has that with SHA-256. Why this sick generation of key material with some md5 artistic stunts - is there no cryptographically safe random source on Windows? Why directly pump some structs (with no padding and magic numbers) into the file? Just so it's a bit more fucked up?
Thanks, that worked.

Any tips to stop getting pissed at your designer's design?

I was given a frontend task after so long (I'm a backend developer who has frontend experience) and the design is very good except architecture wise it's very difficult to build. It's not impossible, but it's very tricky to implement.

Our client has already approved the design, so I guess there's nothing I can do about it
But I am getting constantly annoyed when implementing the design. Whenever I look at the design, I feel like swearing all the time. I feel the designer is very inconsiderate. The design looks very good at big desktop screen, but some part looks dumb in responsive or tablet.

Does anyone ever feel the same? And maybe have tips for me to get by?

My managers have started telling me to stop saying "it's difficult" or "it's too hard". But it is difficult! And I am getting more annoyed when they tell me that.

Whenever I tell the designer that certain part is not gonna work (because we try to make things general so we can reuse), he will argue and somehow ended up saying "come on, just think how prideful you will be after implementing this".

Last job and current job I got mostly the same way. Current job was done slightly more effectively.

Here is what I did both times:
* Each day I checked all the job sites for developer jobs in the locations I was willing to travel to. I made bookmarks to various search pages so I could quickly see the results.
* I regularly searched for websites of any IT companies or large corporations that had offices in those locations. I bookmarked these and would check each day to see if they had job openings on their websites.
* Every job I applied for I made a folder with the date and job description.
* Inside the job folders I made a notes.txt file with the wording of the job and links to the ad. I googled the company and added notes like peoples names, etc. to these notes files.
* For every job I made minor alterations my resume to make sure it aligned with the job ad and copied it to the job folder
* I created another text document called cover_letter.txt which had a written letter describing all my experience that matched with the job ad
* Where possible I would call and speak with someone to get more detail about the job and updated the letter and resume accordingly
* Finally I would email or post the letter and resume

Using this method I was able to apply to several jobs every day and I was able to reuse and improve on the letters as the weeks went by. Also since I applied for a lot of jobs when someone replied I had the job ad available to look at.

For both last and current jobs I moved countries. The difference was between last and current was the previous time I moved first then started looking and for my current job I started looking before I moved. For the current job employers seemed to welcome my situation and I had several job interviews lined up for after my arrival. I felt it put me in a better light since I was essentially unavailable until my arrival date compared to before when I was unemployed and looking and getting desperate.

The job I have now I was interviewed while overseas on skype and then in-person the day after landing in the country. They quickly told me I would be hired. It seemed good so I canceled the other interviews. Sorry no exciting circumstances.

UX/design departments have process, review and do lots of work designing standard look and components for our front end. We use these.

Sometimes when they give us a mockups for new features they break their own rules/components.

Why are you handing me non-standard designs/components, when you made the standard ones and we could just reuse those.

>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met

I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?

When you are writing code in your workplace think about how others can reuse it

Just spent an hour salvaging some code from an app project I abandoned so I can reuse it in the future and add what I salvaged to a portfolio of small things I've made.
It was a simple multiple player name menu that generated player objects once the user was done entering names.
Loads of potential future uses.
No point letting it sit inside an abandoned project even if it is somewhat trivial to reproduce.

I spent the whole damn day trying to setup grpc-web, but this protocol is documented so damn poorly!

You manage to set grpc up for one language and it’s all cool, then you stupidly think that you are free to reuse the compiler you used for the nodejs version for your frontend part but nope! Our web module is now deprecated, please use this module instead!

“Ah yes just clone the repo and check out (…) and you can also check this link whic is in no way highlighted in the middle of a wall of text (…)”

*checking the other page*
Ah yes you need to install a package available only on your unix machine (great! Screw the devs in my team who use windows I guess, they’ll be happy to hear this!) and don’t forget to clone this repo to build your own plugin! And by that I ofc mean to compile it on your own!

- compiler error
After digging for an hour you find a requirement in an obscure issue opened and closed cause “ah yes we have a dependency not stated anywhere” *close issue and never add it to the project*

Fine, fine I can survive this bs

- another compiler error, no solution found after 2 hours

Honestly? Why the fuck do I need to compile this stuff? Just give me a damn npm package I can use? Goddamn it’s just transpiling, you don’t need access to my OS! (Aside for fs to save the files, and which btw is accessible via nodejs)

Now, I COULD download the latest realease as a precompiled, but… honestly?
I give up, I’ll do some shitty rest apis cause the customer’s not paying me enough for even THINKING to go trough this shit again when they’ll ask an iOS app. Or having colleagues asking me to help them understand how to do it.

Side note: also add typescript support to the web-code-generation ffs! Why does node have it and web don’t?

Most recent and visible trend for me is reuse everything. Nobody wants to have anything new, they just want new glue between old pieces.

!rant && advise
I have some expirience working as full stack developer, but focussed latly mainly on backend (php/java). However for one project, I need a desktop application and I was wondering, if you would recommend electron for it.
Pros:
- I could reuse some of the webapp stuff and cache it offline using web workers
- Styling done via HTML/CSS
- Portable between Linux/Windows/Mac
Cons:
- I haven't worked (much) with node js so far, but that shouldn't be a too big problem

What are the pros and cons from your point of view? Would you recommend electron? Why yes, why no? If no, what would you reccomend as alternative?

My knowledge so far:
Good: PHP/Java (without GUI)/CSS
Quite good: Javascript
Meh: Python (I can hack things together but wouldn't say I'm good with it...), C++

Oh... I dont know what to pick...
So i will pick 3 projects from my 3 stages of my dev "carrier"

1.Right after i discovered programing and learned how ,if, while and similar structures worked. The launguage was object pascal with delphi 2007
That was a "safe" with a stupidly complicated lock (text inputs, sliders, ect) it opened a secret folder in the end.

2. It was a embedded code for a Atmega8 AVR, Atmel studio, pure C but without memory managment (i didnt even know that it even existed)
It was a Pip boy knockoff, 16x2 display and a small keyboard connected to the arduino like board that i made on a proto board.
It wasnt that much of a pipboy, it was more of a showoff of atmega8 internal systems, (ADC, timers, interrupts and such)

3.DataLab, after helping my friend with his master thesis, (we meet on discord long story, i was in high school) i decided that mathlab is shit and i created a visual scripting enviroment, launguage C# .net 4 (in the latest version)
I remade the whole program from scrach 1 time, significantly improving everything (code reuse, better algorithms, data processing, code redability and edge cases) I have learned good practises from everywhere. I learned how to use git.

DataLab project looks just like LabViev (i didnt notice that it even existed...), it is frozen now because of my mental status but im planning on using it on my CV when i will be looking for jobs on holidays. There are many things that i can improve in that program but ... first i have to fix myself.

Growing list of asks to a team member that are unheeded:
1) Check in your code frequently
2) Stop the completion emails for your program
3) Stop using your personal UserID/Password to send said email
4) Create classes that do one thing
5) Reuse your database connections
6) Use DataTables and write to the database once and not a bunch of variables and write at the end of your crazy loop-if-else structures.

Never work on a feature which is too huge so it needs to be divided among multiple developers. Reason because there are high chances that one of the devs will do one or more of these:
- Follow his/her own coding style rather than what the system already follows.
- Write generic flows based on his/her part alone making it super difficult for rest to reuse.

I watched a few reviews for the new nvidia RTX 4070 Ti graphics card. One question on my mind is: why is it so huge?

⏺️4090 is huge -> ok I get it, 450W power is a lot of W
⏺️4080 is huge -> ok I guess, 320 W of power is a still a lot of W; although it should be considerably smaller than 4090 (but it is not? why)
⏺️4070 Ti is huge -> 3 slots size for this graphics card? What the actual hell? This card is rated just 285 W. It makes no sense

I do not get it. The only explanation I can find is that the manufacturer got so lazy they cannot be bothered to design 3 different cooling systems, so they reuse the same cooling system on all graphics cards. RIP

- Learned how to use Git properly;
- learning how to use SASS and building the stylesheet of this all by myself;
- Learned how to reuse my code all over the project;
- Made my first design pattern and ruleset to create and maintain a project.

Remember dear web developers, don't be a lazy are and just reuse existing web endpoints. You can only do that to a certain extent. Don't expose a form URL encoded endpoint with dozens of fields and potentially kill the productivity of your mobile dev.

So today was my first time combining mocking, depenancy injection and promises. I thought I had a relatively good understanding of everything until I started writing tests - now my head is spinning.

The actual coding has gone really well - implimented the strategy pattern so I can reuse my code whenever I want to make an API call - and everything is nicely decoupled so it should be easy to test. In theory.

If anyone here happens to write tests for a living, I have a new found respect for you today...

Time for a beer 😅

A question to game devs : which design/architecture patterns do you use ?

Everytime I try to take a look at game development, I feel like there is a lack of guidelines, mostly about architecture.

It's something strange to me as a web dev, as we use much of these patterns on a daily basis. Of course I think about the near omnipresence of MVC and its variants, but not just that. Most of frameworks we do use are essentially focused on architecture, and we litterally have access to unlimited tutorials and resources about how to structure code depending on projects types ans needs.

Let's say I want to code a 2D RPG. This has been done millions of time across the world now. So I assume there should be guidelines and patterns about how to structure your code basis and how to achieve practical use-cases (like the best way to manage hero experience for example, or how to code a turn-based battle system). However I feel these are much harder to find and identify than the equivalent guidelines in the web dev world.

And the old-school RPG case is just an example. I feel the same about puzzle games or 3D games... Sure there are some frameworks and tools but they seems to focus more on physics engine and graphic features than code architecture. There are many tutorials too, but they are actually reinforcing my feeling : like if every game developer (at least every game company) has his on guidelines and methods and doesn't share much.

So... Am I wrong ? Hope to.

What are the tools and patterns you can reuse on many projects ? Where can I find proper game architectures guidelines that reached consensus ?

{
-i won't follow logging practices
-i won't follow secure coding
-i won't leverage profiling n monitoring tools
-i won't reuse best practices
-i won't listen to thought leaders
-i will outsource writing UT
-i will outsource code quality checks
-i will outsource all testing
-i will ignore n overide CTO team

But I still want high stability, security n 4 9s availability. Just want it done. My team is best. Am a fast-track leadership program leader who never has or ever needs to cod. I just know ...
}

People I have to deal with every sprint. Site reliability is not easy ...
Teaching good code makes great products to morons, toughest ...

"Beginners mind needed"

I have to design a small web-based application (flask, MySQL) and it will also need an API (e.g. JSON).

Is it good/recommended practice to have the web browser directly use the JSON API? Or should I just let it post form data and reuse the underlying business logic?

I get a paper and a pen and write down what I know I have to do, what I don't know how to do it and I suspect I don't know yet what I'll have to do.

For the parts I know I'll have to work using a new framework or new tools I try to create a proof of concept project I can reuse later.

I tend to write a bit in paper before coding just to wrap up my head on what I'll have to do.

Omg nextjs 14 is so good. I cant believe this. Server actions are so powerful. This shit makes you prototype and move RAPIDLY FAST. And the framework itself is fast as cum! Unbelievable. No wonder every website lately is built in nextjs. This framework is definitely the future of web. It made working with databases blazingly simple. Prisma ORM is unbelievably flexible. The shit you can build with this framework has no fucking limits! It has /api folder to just add restful apis and just reuse the same prisma methods from shared lib functions and boom you can now scale the project to a mobile app!

All of this bullshit took me YEARS to learn how to do properly in a regular frontend-backend separated type of project. While I learned this nextjs shit blazing fast. Am i missing something or is this framework too good to be true?

I'll bend over for nextjs

I'm rewriting an entire activity of a messaging app. I'm suffering a lot.
ListViews, Databases, Sending/Receiving from server...
And no, I can't reuse code. The original activity is from a decompiled APK, so it's smali code.

Having a code-gasam over here because reuse in Angular > reuse in AngularJS(AJS). Throw in reactive forms instead of template driven forms in AJS and I'm done.

My opinion on CSS & component frameworks?
>Build your own and reuse.

Have I done so? No, but always wanted to and I will have the opportunity to build one next year for a company I work for. Best of all, it will be open sourced.

SUPER EXCITED

I'm trying to set up a websocket abstraction so I can reuse my comms code on BE and FE.

Today I finally smashed/carefully took apart an old piece of furniture.
Kept all the big pieces of wood, because I'm gonna turn them into cutting boards.
The furniture has been with my scout group for 15 years, so it has some sentimental value to some people, but to most it was just a useless piece of shit.

Reduce-reuse-recycle I guess.

I once started developing a chatbot, super easy and simple, a MySQL backend for the QA stuff.
I then started to think on the most modular way to "reuse" the same QA system, and got stuck on it for around 3 days (while doing other things).

Obviously the chatbot stuff could'nt leave my thoughts , and I remember it was a saturday morning, I woke up super excited and just started writing down what my sleepy me was engineering while I was dreaming.

I still have the same system implemented and I'm expecting that some day, in the future, I'll have to rewrite it, and I hope "sleepy-me" helps me again, this time with an actual interesting solution haha