Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

Before I took on my current position (internal transfer), I stated that for what my boss asked for I would need a small team.
He agreed to that and promised I would get 2-3 developers.
6 months after (with countless reminders) he told me I could train some people at one of our providers.
Turns out those guys were Java developers, even though I asked for C# (since our codebase is .net)
After a few training sessions, where concepts as source control were a big topic ("why not just copy the code to a new folder with _good_ naming?"), I gave them a test assignment.
After reviewing their code I just gave up. They cannot program. They don't understand concepts like scoping of variables. Concepts of separation of responsibility.

I told my boss this but I had to make it work with them.

I went to my bosses boss (Head of IT) with my resignation in hand, since I felt my boss didn't want to support me actually getting a team. After a few talks I was asked to "keep it cool" and wait until he presented his new organization.

Now my boss asked me for which skills new developers should have. To which I could just laugh at him and forward countless mails from the last 6-8 months asking for developers.

<Irony>I love my boss</Irony>

!rant

Yesterday I got a pretty straight-forward task of fixing SASS linting errors from our project. I thought, "How many errors could there be?" Turns out there were just around 2000 errors across 109 files!

I was almost like, "Man, this is going to take a lot of my time!"

So, I started fixing the errors one-by-one with my headphones on and switching music genres after every 2 hours.

After almost 6 hours of continuous bug-fixing, my mind kind of became repellant to the possibility of the outer world and my fingers automatically fell on the right keys in almost no time. My brain was functioning like a computer itself.

And after the end of 7 hours, I reduced the number to less than 1000 errors.

Today, I continued the task and found out that there were some scoping errors I made yesterday (web developers would know this pain of '&').

And after working for almost 6 hours today, I got the number down to 500.

Not a rant, but I felt extremely content with what I did today.

I guess every day is not just about programming, sometimes, it's also about making your code better.

Thanks for reading! :)

Interviewer: Discuss scoping in JavaScript.

Applicant: I demand a trial by combat.

js scoping

(Thankgod for 'let' in es6)

There was a sales manager who was raked with overseeing me and another dev finish a last minute request project. He said at one point to the other dev that he was mad at developers because we understood something that he would never understand.

This same manager would often sit in on estimation meetings and constantly say that we were estimating too high and needed to come up with faster solutions. When we would offer him with caveats of possible technical debt or unintended side-effects/performance issues, he'd want us to go with that solution. He would then complain that we were always wanting to work on technical debt and that our application was slow. He would also ask for very high level estimates for large, unscoped features/apps without any meaningful level of detail, then hold us to the high-level estimated date even after revealing additional features previously unmentioned.

We learned to never compromise on the right solution and to push back hard on dates without proper scoping. They didn't learn, so I and most of the good devs left.

Main language, do people have such a thing? Some quixotic shit about various languages I use:

C#: Microsoft
F#: never quite committing to 100% functional paradigms while still being one of the most enjoyable langs I use
Java: null handling via optional and maybes are ugly, but better than it was
C++: surprisingly functional in 2020
Haskell: no one else seems to ❤️ it, despite it being fucking beautiful
Kotlin: Ternary warfare, Czech sports opinions on how languages should work
Clojure: parenthetical scoping makes me far happier than it should
Typescript: makes ever more sense as it changes

Something that really annoys me is when people abuse the lax semicolon rules in JavaScript. Personally I believe semicolons should be a standard and always used in a language like JavaScript, and while the loose rule on semicolons may be considered convenient when one is forgotten every now and then, it is /not/ meant to be abused and semicolons completely unused. It's particularly annoying when I have to work on a group repo at work and the standard is to not use semicolons. JavaScript to me is much more similar to a C style language than something like Python, so even though the language is built to be loose and easy conventions such as bracket scoping and semicolons should be kept and practiced.

Learning Rust.

Holy brainfucking brain melt, those references, scoping and borrowing and cloning and whatnot, because there is no garbage collector, but also no direct memory management.

It's cool, but also hard for a noob coming from the JVM/Android. The compiler error messages are helpful, but I immediately found some cryptic ones that don't help me at all.

GIT COMMMIT LOG VERSION 011
-------------------------
4cc7d0d Derp, asset redirection in dev mode
6b6e213 Lock S-foils in attack position
1e44549 I am even stupider than I thought
2f6bec9 You should have trusted me.
891851a To those I leave behind, good luck!
3367d77 Update .gitignore
46d6b0f Merging the merge
b12f6fe First Blood
0598e4f 8==========D
9151ff4 Finished fondling.
3a0ec1e ...
8358c20 c&p fail
bc1e834 magic, have no clue but it works
31bb17a I don't get paid enough for this shit.
21edb91 :(:(
7a71610 Stephen rebase plx?
2060661 Copy-paste to fix previous copy-paste
21ac5d2 Handled a particular error.
2dedd90 pam anderson is going to love me.
c3d4c83 omg what have I done?
d38bafd Herping the derp derp (silly scoping error)
e461773 Merge pull request #67 from Lazersmoke/fix-andys-shit Fix andys shit
1faf82b Is there an award for this?
1f6e3f3 Feed. You. Stuff. No time.
6f0097d I'm too old for this shit!
133179e I'm just a grunt. Don't blame me for this awful PoS.
d3e5202 harharhar
57d9a7c THE MEM TEST FUNCTION YOU ARE LOOKING FOR, IS HERE. SAY THANKS FOR THIS COMMIT MESSAGE

Tried to write a short article about Javascript IIFE modules, ended up explaining about function block scoping all the way to closures before I eventually get to the IIFE module explanation itself...

I'm really bad at this 😓

The biggest things I’ve probably learned working on side projects are patience and planning. Side projects are a great place to hone your skills of negotiation with other people, but I’ve personally learned a great deal about the process of architecture, simply by doing side projects where I’ve experienced scoping and tooling problems later on. Being patient lends itself to getting better at planning. Working with others on side projects has given me insight into “when to hold em and when to fold em”...and again, this patience education has often helped me be a better planner for a multitude of tasks.

$ ng generate component gofuckyourself

I am having a fun time learning Angular. It’s way different from React.

I do like the css scoping a lot. Also it’s strange to not have to deal with state.

I am learning it because I see the job market requiring it as opposed to React.

Any React peeps feel me?

Just found out that something like this would actually work in Java:

int a = 2;
switch(a) {
case 1:
int b = 1;
break;
case 2:
b = 2;
}

I know about the variable scoping part, but that doesn't means if the language allows this kind of shitty code you should use it.. Fuck took me 15 mins to resolve the merge conflicts. As during merge the 1st case was partially removed. And the code was filled with these kinds of logic. This could have been done in a minute without the shitty code..

Salt is awesome, no questions about that. YAML is giving me headaches, but it's my fault and eventually I'll get used to it. But this being my first encounter with jinja, WHO THE HELL THOUGHT THIS PIECE OF CRAP DESERVES TO LIVE! Instead of writing python inside {% %} you have to write kinda pseudo python and I just spend over hour trying to build list inside for. Yes, great idea, scoping fors, and lets make it hard to escape scoping, beacause it would be a shame if somebody COULD ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING USEFULL. I though several times of using different renderer, but I want to keep my code readable and mainrainable and in the end I found a workaround, but still, Jinja, YOU SUCK!

I’m meeting an acquaintance who wants to discuss a web app idea they‘d like to have developed. I’ve always worked full-time and have no experience running a side gig, scoping a project or what questions to ask. I would appreciate any advice on how to approach this meeting and any resources that will help with scoping/pricing.

There's no favourite coding challenge for me. Of course I do them when I'm asked to but I don't think anyone can derive how Well someone works from these short toy challenges.

I once had a proper prototyping Challenge that was really fun. I had to Work on it in advance to the interview. I had to define the scope and how much time I will spend in it in advance and then explain and defend the scoping and all technological/architecture decisions and handle proper criticism in the interview. No bullshit coding challenges Had to be solved :)
I think these prototyping challenges will Tell you way more about an applicant and his worth as a dev than those little challenges ever could.

Typescript is my new favorite and my grudge is the stupid scoping of type assertions. I have an async function that checks whether a variable is set and awaits a change event if it's undefined. This function is working javascript but invalid according to typescript, because it relies on the exact type changing while the function is running. I had to convert it to a mess of promises to bypass this because (and this is the best) the callback-based syntax of identical meaning will reset all type assertions, even locals that are never written after the callback's creation.

I usually try to break down what they are asking for into smaller parts. The tricky part is scoping them without granular details of how it will actually get done and thinking only about complexity. Then add up time and give the total a bucket size. 1-5 hrs 6-15, 16-30, 30+ etc. Turn around time is another matter but that's never predictable. By the time clients approve the quote availability is totally different.

CSS and libraries doesn't mix. Something about the lack of scoping and the unintended side effects that happen from using two different libraries that add inline style via JS. I'm looking at you, position!!!!

Can the error types of my library depend on a custom library context object to be printable or otherwise meaningful? Pretty much everything else depends on this context, but until now the errors were an exception (no pun intended) because I wanted them to be printable by any handler that bumps into them, without scoping concerns. Now I tried removing them and like a third of my library has suddenly become context-free, because it only used the context to fully resolve everything before error reporting.