Every fu**in time!!

When after hours of coding it compiles without errors or warnings on the first try

At an interview, the first round was an online coding round. Two questions, one easy one hard, 90 minutes, easy peasy.

I solved the hard one first.
A bit of good logic, followed MVC pattern, all done. Worked flawlessly.
Submitted code. Online compiler threw up an internal error citing java is an invalid command(jdk not found).
Called the invigilators. What I heard next, I couldn't believe this shit.
"We're not responsible for any errors you may be having. Figure it out yourself"
I was like WTF dude. This is not even a compilation or runtime error!
After a heated discussion, I made him look at the code.
Him - what is all this classes and all? Why haven't you written everything inside the main function?
Me - those are model classes. Those are different helper functions. That is a recursive function to avoid 5 for loops and use divide and conquer. Ever heard of OOP? what kind of person writes a 300 line program inside one function?
Him - no no we write it like that only. Correct this.
Me - I fit everything inside the main function. Still the same error, java not installed. Called the idiot to have a look at it.
Him - yeah your code is wrong.
Me - may I know what's wrong with it? Can you fix it please?
Him - no no we aren't allowed to see the code (he had already read it twice. It was compiling and running perfectly, locally) .
Yeah you solved only 1 problem, you were supposed to solve 2.
Me - yes because the rest of the time I had the pleasure of your company. (It isn't everyday that I see talking buffoons.)

Yippee, my code compiled successfully.
What possibly could go wrond now 😂😂

I know the feeling too well...

Recently I fucked up my laptop's rootfs USB stick again by tugging on it with some wire.. I think it got detached during runtime. Doesn't boot anymore.

So I attached it to my server to chroot into it and see what's wrong..
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdf2 cryptroot
> Unlocks without errors.
# btrfsck /dev/mapper/cryptroot
> Nothing wrong.
# mount /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
> Mounts just fine.
# chroot /mnt (some other filesystems like /proc, /sys, and /dev were mounted first but meh)
> Enters chroot just fine.
# pacman -Syu
> Upgrades just fine.
# su condor
> Switches user just fine.
$ vim -p some files
> Enters the editor just fine.

Mounted it again to my laptop and try to boot, because it clearly seems like everything is just fine..
> Not gonna boot up. You can unlock your cryptroot and then I'll just fucking stall without saying shit.

MotherFFFFUUUUCCKKKEERRRRRRR!!!!!!! Fuck you HP for making such horrible USB connectors, and fuck you Arch for not giving something more verbose related to the issue, so that I can actually know what's wrong with you, and fucking FIX IT!!! Fucking pieces of junk! Do I really have to build my own PC and build my own LFS, just to have something halfway decent?!

Dear Santa, please bring me a compiler that generates compile errors instead of runtime bugs. Thanks.

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

Some fun facts :

☻ Programmers spend approximately 30% of the time surfing the source code 😁

☻ Progress in programming can be classified into 4 stages:
(a). Complex Programming
(b). Making Progress
(c). Slow Progress
(d). Stuck

☻ Programmers have a tendency to report their problems incompletely

☻ The main error messages, execution times and runtime compilation errors and the average time to solve them

☻ The software maintenance consumes more than 50% of the effort

☻ Ctrl C, Ctrl V, and Ctrl-Z have saved more lives than Batman tbh😇

University Coding Exam for Specialization Batch:
Q. Write a Program to merge two strings, each can be of at max 25k length.
Wrote the code in C, because fast.
Realized some edge cases don't pass, runtime errors. Proceed on to check the locked code in the Stub. (We only have to write methods, the driver code is pre-written)
Found that the memory for the char Arrays is being allocated dynamically with size 10240.
Rant #1:
Dafuq? What's the point of dynamic Memory Allocation if you're gonna fix it to a certain amount anyway?
Continuing...
Called the Program Incharge, asking him to check the problem and provide a solution. He took 10 minutes to come, meanwhile I wrote the program in Java which cleared all the test cases. <backstory>No University Course on Java yet, learnt it on my own </backstory>
Dude comes, I explain the problem. He asks me to do it in C++ instead coz it uses the string type instead of char array.
I told him that I've already done it in Java.
Him: Do you know Java?

Rant #2:
No you jackass! I did the whole thing in Java without knowing Java, what's wrong with you!

Me yesterday evening:

"Fuck java, fuck JVM, fuck everything about it, shit doesn't work for some reason, no runtime errors, no compiler errors, no syntax errors, nothing, *turns off computer*".

Me today morning(coffee = false), after comparing the documented example code provided by the API with one someone else made, I've noticed that the one provided by the API was messed up and couldn't work.

"Lemme change that one value in the properties...okay here we go"
Shit works out perfectly.

FUCK FALSELY DOCUMENTED CODE

FUCK DOCUMENTATIONS IN GENERAL

am i the only one here who finds compile time errors easier to trace than runtime errors?

The joy of learning typescript!
One thing I hated about Javascript, fucking runtime errors when I mistakenly fuckup with a typo or assign wrong param to my vars

...when you are scared to run the code!

I'm thinking of designing a programming language.

I want it to have easy to read syntax like python. Inheritance and interfaces like java. More advanced concepts like pointers and memory management like c++.

I was originally going to write my own compiler but I figured it's not worth reinventing the wheel. So the current plan is to basically just create a parser that turns a source file into c++ code and then that is compiled with g++. The only problem I can think of with that is catching runtime errors.

How does this language sound?

My purpose is to have a language that is as easy to read as python but with the speed of a compiled program and the ability to use it for embedded projects. I feel like reading larger C++ projects can be quite time consuming. So I figure the trade off of taking a little longer to write the code to make it more obvious what is going on is better than having a lot of syntax that can be tough to walk though the logic of (I find this often with c and c++, not like I don't figure it out but It definitely takes longer than it does to read and understand python)

"I'm gonna wake up early, and hammer out this feature, being super productive tomorrow"

Tomorrow comes:
- unexpected build errors
- unexpected runtime errors
- intermittent CI pipeline errors
- spends two hours trying to resolve errors
- literally hasn't touched the thing that's important

What else is going to go sideways? Watch Bitbucket or CircleCI fuck up and refuse to deploy this live for some stupid reason.

Developing IoT prototype, from Linux platform, via Java servers to front-end web-ui has made me fear and praise all these JS developers.

On one hand they are the heroes of modern technology, on the other hand they are bat shit crazy sadomasochistic lunatics riding their frameworks through a sea of users complains and runtime errors

"Most memorable bug you fixed?"

A recent instance happened in one of my Scratch projects, and the bug involved "Infinities."

I had an opportunity to teach kids programming, and it involved Scratch. So, to have something to show those kids at least, I decided to make a small game.
In that game, I had an object that takes some time before appearing after being cloned (i.e., instantiated.) The duration was calculated by dividing a constant with a variable:
[Wait for ((3) / (variable)) seconds]
The bug is that I forgot about the case where 'variable' can be 0, which is classic and insignificant.

Well, the thing is that I learned two things the hard way:
1: Scratch is very flexible about integers and floats (e.g., at one second, it looks like an integer, but one operation later, it's a float.)
2: Scratch does not provide any 'runtime errors' that can crash the project.

In other languages, similar "wait" methods take "milliseconds" in an integer, so it would have barfed out a "DivideByZeroException" or something. But Scratch was so robust against project-crashing behavior that it literally waited for f*<king "infinity seconds," effectively hanging that clone without warning or runtime errors. This masked my bug. It took way too long to debug that s#!+.

Don't blanket-mask any errors.

What's the point of using TypeScript if you type all of your code with `any` or worst part is you don't provide any types!?

P.S
If you're anti-typescript or any static linting tool, I know this will not prevent any runtime errors, but this is part of the testing/code quality. My teammates do not care for quality, and I'm tired of it.

Haskell: Turning runtime bugs into compile-time errors.
Python: Turning compile-time errors into runtime bugs.

Elm code can’t produce runtime errors because nobody executes it.

Well code jams qualifiers are over.
Super easy problems and yet I still didn't qualify! Bummer...

The Code Abyss Beckons! 🤯

Hey fellow devs, brace yourselves for a wild ride into the chaotic realm of code confessions and debugging dramas! 🎢💻

So, here I am, standing at the precipice of my latest coding adventure, armed with a keyboard and a questionable amount of caffeine. 🚨☕

Today's quest involves unraveling the mysteries of a legacy code that seems to have been written in a language only decipherable by ancient coding sages. 😱📜

As I navigate through the nested loops of confusion and dance with the dragons of runtime errors, I can't help but wonder: Is this what the Matrix feels like for developers? 🕵️‍♂️💊

In the midst of my debugging odyssey, I stumbled upon a comment in the code that simply said, "// Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." 🏴‍☠️📛 Well, isn't that reassuring?

And then there's the moment when you finally fix that elusive bug, and you feel like you've just tamed a mythical creature. 🦄✨ Victory dance, anyone? 💃🕺

But let's not forget the rubber duck sitting on my desk, patiently listening to my monologues about algorithms and existential coding crises. 🦆🗣️

So, dear coding comrades, how's your journey through the code abyss going? Any epic wins or facepalming fails to share? Let the rants flow like a river of improperly closed tags! 🌊🚫

May your semicolons be where they should and your documentation be ever truthful. Happy coding, and may your merge conflicts be swift and painless! 🌈🤞

#CodeOdyssey #DebuggingDrama #DevRantChronicles

in vb.net i can declare a void function:
Declare Function some_func& Lib "some_lib.dll" ()
then try to assign its return value to a variable:
some_return = some_func()
and get no errors during compilation, not even a warning
but in runtime it produces integer arithmetic overflow exception
in what way it is not even a warning?

Christmas greetings from ol' Athlon
Fa-la-la-la-laa, la-laa, laa, laa
With a source code of many "if's" on
Fa-la-la-la-laa, la-laa, laa, laa
When the runtime errors are ringing
Fa-la-laa, la-la-laa, laa, laa, laa
I cheer up my mood with singing
Fa-la-la-la-laa, la-laa, laa, laa

Someone else had to work with that turd of WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus?
I hate everything of it: its fucking buggy IDE (a lazy fork of Eclipse in which they didn't even bothered to replace the Eclipse icon), its cryptic XML language which makes basic operations such as accessing a JSON field a complete PITA, its fragility (often syntax errors doesn't get caught by the compiler but causes runtime errors which are hard to diagnose) its shitty testability...