My "Coding Standards" for my dev team

1.) Every developer thinks or have thought their shit don't stink. If you think you have the best code, submit it to your peers for review. The results may surprise you.

2.) It doesn't matter if you've been working here for a day or ten years. Everyone's input is valuable. I don't care if you're the best damn programmer. If you ever pull rank or seniority on someone who is trying to help, even if it isn't necessarily valid or helpful, please have your resume ready to work elsewhere.

3.) Every language is great and every language sucks in their own ways. We don't have time for a measuring contest. The only time a language debate should arise is for the goal of finding the right one for the project at hand.

4.) Comment your code. We don't have time to investigate what the structure and purpose of your code is when we need to extend upon it.

5.) If you use someone else's work, give them the credit in your comments. Plagiarism will not be tolerated.

6.) If you use flash, you will be taken out back and shot. If you survive, you will be shot again.

7.) If you load jQuery for the sole purpose of writing a simple function, #6 applies.

8.) Unless it is an actual picture, there is little to no reason for not utilizing CSS. That's what it's there for.

9.) We don't support any version of Internet Explorer and Edge other than the latest versions, and only layout/alignment fixes will be bothered with.

10.) If you are struggling with a task, reach out. While you should be able to work independently, it doesn't make sense to waste your time and everyone else's to not seek assistance when needed.

11.) I'm serious about #6 and #7. Don't do it.

Being paid to rewrite someone else's bad code is no joke.

I'll give the dev this, the use of gen 1,2,3 Pokemon for variable names and class names in beyond fantastic in terms of memory and childhood nostalgia. It would be even more fantastic if he spelt the names correctly, or used it to make a Pokemon game and NOT A FUCKING ACCOUNTANCY PROGRAM.

There's no correspondence in name according to type, or even number. Dev has just gone batshit, left zero comments, and now somehow Ryhorn is shitting out error codes because of errors existing in Charmeleon's asshole.

The things I do for money...

How developers deal with someone else's code!
Fixing bugs after bugs and it goes on.

Protip: always check for snarky comments before pushing

1. Have some issue with my code which spits out cryptic compiler error.

2. Ask on stack overflow, Reddit, etc for a solution.

3. Get scolded at for "not reading the documentation" and "asking questions which could be answered by just Googling". Still no clue what I'm doing wrong, or what the solution would be.

4. Find someone else's vaguely related problem.

5. Post my problematic code as the answer, with arrogant comment about OP being a retard for not figuring that out for themselves.

6. A dozen angry toxic nerds flock in to tell me how retarded and wrong I am, correcting me... solving my original problem.

7. Evil plan succeeded, my code compiles, and as a bonus I made the internet a worse place in the process.

I think if you tell a bunch of autistic neckbeards that "all coronaviruses are fundamentally incurable", you'd have a vaccine within a week.

When you start reading someone else's code and all you do is properly indent for the first 30 mins so you can actually read it.

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

At work, everytime someone finds a piece of code (their own or someone else's) that couldn't possibly have ever worked, we draw a line. Obviously preceded by finding out who wrote said code.

Debugging someone else's code and having the thought: "Am I better off just writing the code again from the start?!"

I would absolutely love it if people would write their own stupid code instead of blindly mixing everyone else's mental diarrhea together and pouring the resulting mess into their bloody stupid IDE. At least then I could insult them properly. As it is, they're outsourcing their fucking stupidity to the lowest fucking bidder and then bragging about how quickly they get everything done. And management eats it up! No wonder everything is a slow, tangled, unmaintanable mess.

I can't fix much of anything because almost none of it is in my control. It's all autogenerated bullshit glued together with laziness and poor taste. "But Root, why is fixing this taking so long?" Gee, I wonder why. Maybe if someone had built it somewhere in realm of correctly the first time, it wouldn't have all fallen apart when someone looked at it the wrong way!

Seriously, there's no way this pile of stale fertilizer could have passed QA.

Pair programming to refactor someone else's code.

i really hate when i have to read someone else's shity code ... I'd rather write the entire code from scratch -_- !

I just fucking despise working on someone else's code and it's filled with errors like "reciever" instead of "receiver" or "mesasge" instead of "message"...

it fucking leads to an astonishing amount of fucking errors just because I know how to write english words AND I'M ITALIAN WTF

When you manage to find and fix the leak in someone else's hideous C++ code...

"...the way he has written the code, it feels nasty man. I would have done it this way..."

Fuck you and your feelings. If you think my code is bad, give justification for it. Explain the fucking reason. Stop saying it "feels" like a bad code.

Fucking tired of this mentality in most of the developers. Why is it that the moment you look at someone else's code, you feel like you would have written it better. Programming is problem solving. And you can solve a problem in couple of different way.

If the code is absolute shit, has followed no best practices then yeah, go ahead and call it a bad code. But just because you would have moved some lines here and there, that doesn't mean the other persons code is horrible.

Goddamit!

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

Hunted a bug for 8 hours, thinking it was a problem in my code....

Found out it was someone else's code generator that injected the bug...

Contacted the concerned dev... Had to convince him for another 3 hours that it was his change to the code that caused the issue. He is still sure that his change can't break the code...... What the fuck are you..? A fucking God programmer who never makes mistakes??

I mean how hard is it to just accept when I just proved it to you??

wk54.

The ability to understand someone else's code instantly. Ah, the pain it would save me.

Someone else's Code....😠😇

My advisor thought that my MCL algorithm behaves a bit strange, so he wanted me to investigate it. I said I'd be happy to review the code because I anyway considered refactoring, and asked if I can have another pair of eyes to help me.
A more senior PhD student was assigned to help me, and by the suggestion of my advisor we tested my code against a very well-written and well-performing implementation of MCL. This implementation was written by another professor, who is a close friend of my advisor and the actual supervisor of the student assigned to help.
But this implementation was optimized for a very specific type of maps, and on the maps I worked on it just failed consistently. The student, in a misguided attempt to protect the pride of his advisor and subsequently his, wasted days adding code and fine-tuning the implementation.
In the meantime, my MCL has a stable configuration that converges on both types of maps. It behaves differently, but the outcome is about the same as the other implementation.
I am a little sick of wasting my time (week+) on someone else's attempt to reassure their ego, so I'm doing my planned research work on the weekend...

Why does Google not have a dark mode for their freaking home page? I have dark mode on everything on my computer then I go to look something up on Google and get blinded. If they can do it for YouTube why don't they get it together on their nearly blank, bright white search page. You're better than this Google. And while I'm on that topic same to you stackoverflow. When I'm copying someone else's code at least let me do it in dark mode.

Refactoring someone else's code (the dude's a senior).
I'm a junior, just updated my linkedin, burnout activated, I can't deal with this kind of shit no more.

Outro: this is the nicest piece of code from him, every other line of code just .... just.... D:

Fixing someone else's code who left the job.
Production suddenly not working, cannot debug locally, cannot deploy to a test environment because it does not exists anymore.
There should be a contract clause that developer need to support his project for 2 years after he leaves his job.

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

Please ++ this. I need a stress ball. I've been debugging someone else's code for the past 8 hours and it might as well be written in Sindarin script.

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

When someone else's JS got you like... Want some meatballs and garlic bread with that spaghetti code?

This feature I'm building requires crossing over to a second application for some actions (fair, this reduces repetition), but the method used for it is kind of ridiculous.

To keep with the existing patterns, I followed suit, and added two PATCH and a DELETE routes, wrappers, and calls. (Typical CRUD + de/reactivate).

But. This freaking halfassed HTTP model doesn't support anything but POST and PUT! wtf. (Also, the various IDs, naming schemes, and required json data/formats differ across view, controller, and endpoints. but whatever?)

Two and a half hours later, and the feature is done and works wonderfully. Four times the functionality of the previous incarnation, and the code is only about 25% longer! haha.

Ahh, I'm complimenting myself again. (but somebody has to, right? 😅)

but really, when i want to get something done i'm actually surprised at how quickly it all comes together. Even when I need to patch API Guy's madness.

(and this time I actually found someone else's code in the mess! It was actually worse!)

I suppose taking a day off yesterday did me some good.

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.

One thing that will eat up your whole day is someone else's uncommented code and you are supposed to enhance its functionality.

I got a "Revise and Resubmit" response from the journal. Reviewer #1 wanted me to implement some baselines to compare against my method and he cited 6 papers. 5 of them did not have open-source code, and it's not like you can re-implement, train models and fine-tune someone else's approach in 2 weeks. The last one had code, for Ubuntu 14 (may its soul rest in peace), OpenCV version from the time America and Europa were connected and CUDA toolkit that was carved in stone in a cave.
I was bawling my eyes out, thinking about how many days it would take trying to Docker it to work. But then I realized the approach he cited was for RGB-D data, while I only use RGB camera. That's like letting a sniper with an M82 compete in archery....

My FAVORITE bugs are those in someone ELSE's code that MY code depends on. Like an API that won't respond correctly when I FOLLOW THE DOCUMENTATION EXACTLY. 😐

The best mentors I had were the people at the company where I started working.

I was doing my master thesis, bored like hell writing about someone else's idea. I decided to drop out and do a 10 week apprenticeship at this company. They had been my mentors in a university project and thought it would be nice to see what I could learn from them. I wasn't wrong.

During that time they taught me Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Node and Git. They taught me about coding standards and how to write better, more maintainable code. They inspired me to keep learning and also to share my knowledge. In the end I didn't stay there, but they helped me get my first real job.

If it weren't for those 10 weeks my career would have been a lot different. I wouldn't be the developer I am today without them and I'm forever grateful.

I am not a front end developer. Don't have the skill set, but I am learning. Work assigns me an "easy" task of modifying someone else's angular code(with all those <div> tags) to change some functionality. If it was well formatted, easy shit.

WHY THE FUCK DID THE PREVIOUS FUCKER INDENT LIKE THEY HATE ME? PARENT TAGS ARE FARTHER OUT THAN CHILDREN TAGS. SOME OF THE TAGS ARE 10 TABS FROM THE LEFT, WHILE THEIR CHILD IS ONLY 2. IN ADDITION, ALL THEIR CODE IS COPY PASTED FROM OTHER FILES, REFERENCES CONTROLLERS FROM OTHER PARTS OF THE CODE IT DOESNT NEED!

I am tempted to kill it with fire, find the person who wrote it(on a different continent), kill them, and then rewrite the whole thing in a language I am still learning. FUCK!

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

I just fixed my first code issue in my first IT job ever! Holy fucking shit I'm almost senior software engineer by now!

That magic joy of knowing that my instructions will run on someone else's computer is just mind-blowing.

When you see someone else's code:

Me when looking at someone else's code.

(Sorry for bad fps, had to get it under 5mb)

When you inherit someone else's code base

THIS FUCKING RECAPTCHA GEM! WHY THE FUCK MUST I DEBUG YOUR FUCKING PRODUCTION CODE AND WORK AROUND YOUR FUCKING BLUNDERS?

VERY LITTLE PISSES ME OFF MORE THAN SUFFERING FROM SOMEONE ELSE'S FUCKING STUPIDITY

So before the Age of JavaScript, when programming was trying to be an engineering discipline, I felt like we were getting close to figuring out what worked and what didn't. We had rules of thumb (more general than Patterns) and code smells.
Then JavaScript came in and no one had time to think about "engineering" anymore. I'm fine with MVP and small iterations, but the disdain I see for making code clean and extendable and improvable is baffling (and annoying). First-time coders might never have had to fix someone else's code, but two weeks in a chair should have fixed that.
It's not that understanding code is so hard (although it can be); understanding the _intent_ is hard. This MVP is great, but when no one had time to document what is actually supposed to happen, programmers have to reverse-engineer the *design*.

When you use someone else's poorly written code in a memory inefficient language

Refactoring someone else's code. I wish I hadn't been born.

Had an issue running through someone else's buggy code and my PM told me to "use a goto to fix it up, those always used to help me in school". Can a recruiter on here throw me a bone and get me out of this place?

How I see my code,

If(){else]:
Do -> this & that with them;
While (for)and >>;
//It takes me forever to figure our my own code

How I see someone else's code,

%fGu$@@)$'®}£jfksksj℅™™}£}∆¢b&jjwoajqh-2+=•{(=jajaJJwUUhh-jtffhk®{£{™>>¥,©®¢€££∆¶¶|×££{©]•{%$==¢++''). 92%+$+
//well I am not sure how in the world I manage to understand someone else's shit

It's about 6 hours that i trying to fix a bug in someone else's code 😭☹️
😔🔫

Of course I can change someone else's code to do something totally different, understand it and all within an hour of your call... on a Sunday morning! 😠

When reading through someone else's code, what about it made you think "Damn this is well written" or similar?

Any language - I have a bias towards PHP, C++ and C though.

Had to make a change in an ugly codebase. For this I had to change a config value which was duplicated three times in the code base. So I wanted to refactor the code so that the config was in one place.

I worked on this for two days and it was starting to look good. On the third day when I started to work on this I realized that I couldn't start the server anymore. Looking through version control I figure out that my co-worker had stayed till 3am last night to work on the change I was supposed to make.

I had to spend all morning undoing his commits. Once I was done refactoring the actual change took me ten minutes.

Why the fuck would you stay until the middle of the night to work on someone else's task?!

Could have just asked how it was coming along if I wasn't working fast enough for him.

What's the funniest comment you've ever come across in someone else's code? 🙃

Me: Hits blocking bug in someone else's code. Everyone's busy and stressed, I'll have a look myself. Find the problem, find associated documentation. In a language I don't really know, so pass this to appropriate dev.
Them: It's not a problem for me.
Me: ... Wut?

I don't work there anymore...

I joined in June to work on a project due to release in July. It released in December.

TAKE CONSENT BEFORE YOU TOUCH SOMEONE ELSE'S CODE

I almost rage quit today bc I'm maintaining someone else's unreadable code

I've created a code review for merging someone else's code, coz they were signed off sick for the last month.

They're making comments about how it's wrong.

It's code they wrote, but restructured to be more readable.

They wrote incorrect code that was just so illegible they didn't realise.

How do I explain this diplomatically?

when you had to indent the code everytime you work on someone else's code

Fixing someone else's PHP spaghetti code is a pain in the ass. Who wrote this code 😭

I think this is the first time ever on my team where I read someone else's source code and actually went "wow... This is pretty well written and structured". No god methods or classes.

When you have to fix someone else's code because you can't push your changes because of their rotting code.

In my current team, when someone else's code breaks, I fix it. When my code breaks, I also fix it. I feel like there's something wrong here...

What was/is your favourite learning experience?
The best teacher (besides google) for your language of choice?

Was it a book? a video series? an instructor? A person? A mentor? Your cat? Maybe dissecting someone else's code...?

Mine is laracasts.com You're welcome Jeffrey.

Does anyone else have experience on a team where everyone seems to be doing their own thing across the full stack/multiple systems/languages but then they're all stepping over each other, breaking other each other's code so ends up doing a lot of rework to update your code to someone else's change.

And also many wheels get reinvented in slightly different ways because no one is aware that something like ... Already exists and can be reused or refactor.... Or how to use it correctly.

Basically we're like all moving in different directions instead of in sync.

I feel maybe the team is too big and everyone is doing everything, wearing too many hats... and maybe should define roles and ownership better.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

Refactoring someone else's code is a lot harder (and annoying) than writing from scratch!

What's the best comment you have ever come across in someone else's code?

My worst experience has actually been trying to fix someone else's code. One of my friends is in a graphic design class, and right now they have to do a basic site in DreamWeaver (a small nightmare on its own, I've found that the previews they show are never quite correct). I decided I'd at least pop in to help out a bit, cause they kinda have no clue what they're doing. They are graphic design students, NOT developers, and it's very easy to see that.

One of the first things I noticed was EXTREMELY unorganized code, but that's forgivable. But...I once saw probably 5 </body> tags in someone's code, a JavaScript function inside of the <body> tag, and a bunch of CSS statements in the <script> tag that they had one if the JS functions in.

I remember seeing this stuff, and I thought "what the actual fuck?". The dude was like "yeah it's unorganized as hell, I know"

...That's not the problem. CSS goes in either a <style> tag or a separate file (THEY HAD A SEPARATE CSS FILE). JAVASCRIPT GOES IN A <script> TAG OR A SEPARATE FILE

But, I get it. They're graphic design students. They can outdo me in probably everything in the Adobe suite (except DW as I learned). I once watched a girl in there do a project in Illustrator. I had no fucking clue what was going on. And when I was talking to her about it, she said "that's what I was thinking when we were watching you fix our code"

Kinda got a little sidetracked there. Basically, worst experience is non developers writing code for an assignment.

We had this team project to do in my second year at university. In C btw. My team consisted from 3 members. We had about a month or so to finish it. So of course we started 2 weeks before the submission. Well... I started. Those two didn't give damm about it at first but after I pushed them to do something one of them tried to code this simple function. It was supposed to check if the opptions from command line could be combined. His fuction had around !!200!! lines of code 😲 but he swear it was working. I was skeptic so i tested it. waaaaaait for it... it didn't work... the very first combination I tried that should not be accepted passed his awesome test 😱 I gave him another two chances. Result was the same.
I was furious. I had my part to do with little time to test someone else's code... So I desided to code the whole project on my own. Then I told my "coworkers" that they either pay me for it or they will be without any point for this project. I earned 80 € that day 😀😎

Btw my test function for those opptions had less than 10 lines 😁

Agreeing to work on supporting someone else's legacy code instead of insisting on razing it and rebuilding.

TL;DR Shit programer trying pass off stealing code as "Recycling"

Backstory:
Client hires senior dev. He lied and knows nothing. Has been causing havoc in production since day 1. My crusades to defend production have been without much success.

Since he wants to LITERALLY put his name on every big project, he finds any reason to make a new version of it (or make a slight astetic modification) to say he did something.

The client doesn't know or care about the programming side of things. Which means it is incredibly difficult to get him to understand the issues this brings. Not to mention that the "senior dev" is acting as a consultant to the client, altering the facts.

Story:
The piece of shit, is trying to make a new version of a big project. It was originally made by my mentor. Again, if you are using someone else's work to complete your own, I don't care. But if you take 99% of another person's work and then say...

"I took and existing project, which was similar to what I'm trying to make. Then I modified it to fit our needs."

Fuck you man!

You took someone else's work. Now you're trying to present it as your own. No references to our team. Again, there is literally nothing new about this project. It's exactly like the original. The client didn't even ask for this.

The struggle when you have to work on your muscle memory every time you get a new laptop/keyboard. For extremists - using someone else's keyboard/setup to do a code fix.

You know what's worse than reading someone else's code? Reading someone else's code with comments that make absolutely no sense!

It's like deciphering hieroglyphics. If you're going to comment, at least give me a hint, not a riddle.

It's not a treasure hunt; it's coding!

Lately I take work literally seriously, not due to motivation but due to fear, more on that later, but this is what I think about lately while I'm working

> that line of code should fix it
> oh shit I should've checked logs
> let me check logs
> let me put 10 breakpoints in code and javascript in chrome
> why is this bug not reproducing?
> why I have to work on someone else's spaghetti code?
> this loop iterates over all customers' data I'll just step over it, Oh fuck I resumed

etc etc

I'm feared because where I live, isn't a good place for software developers as there aren't companies which hire, those who hire need ninja developers who complete 1 JIRA Sprint/Phase in 1 day, Here I feel safe as there are people to correct me plus coffee machine

Bugs are good in code. It shows that you're Human. You make mistakes. And you're willing to correct them.

But when they're someone else's bugs in a piece of code they didn't give a flying fuck about documentation, bugs can tick one off. The bigger the project, the better the documentation needs to be. And I'm not taking about java docs. Put proper comments in your code. Especially when it's not a personal project and you fully intend to leave the company.

Writes good code because "Good code is it's own documentation"

Ends up documenting someone else's code. :(

The other day was reading someone else's shitty code which had taken an object into a set without implementing the hashcode and the equals, cursed the developer and fixed that and informed the QA about their lackadaisical attitude. Later on that fix broke some other functionality on live and now the QA team gives me the stares. Feeling like birdman...

It's so annoying to optimise and fix someone else's code..esp if the someone else is a newbie!!!

1. The power you have with it.
With that, I mean solving your own or someone else's issues.
Be it automation, parsing weird formats, or anything else, it can usually be achieved by coding something for the task.
2. The logic (when compared to humans).
Unlike humans, code does what it's told to do. Us humans, well, we often misinterpret things. Code, however, usually has a single meaning.
3. How things can be improved over time.
Finding a way do something faster and implementing it is really satisfying.

Anything from Udemy with instructors who don't speak CLEARLY, and instructors who fail to provide solid code explanations (ex: they just type some shit and expect us to understand what it's doing, and they move onto the next topic).

Add instructors who pretty much copy a tutorial verbatim - they just go through someone else's tutorial (without referencing the authors' work) and claim it as their own.

I'm sure I have more to add, but I'll stop here. :P

I hate it when I am looking online at someone else's code where they thought they could just paste 50+ lines of code with no formatting! Or even worse, the sites desktop app has formatting, but on mobile, the app just smashes everything together. Does anyone else have this problem?

Most of the stuff I know comes from debugging other people's code. When working on someone else's project, I try to understand what their code is doing and think how I could make it better and if it's possible to extend the functionality to make it do other things as well.

Have you ever noticed how angry and hateful you can get just by reading someone else's code. I think I'm losing about 5 minutes of life per minute of code that I'm reading this shit.
On the plus side every minute feels like an hour so quantitatively I end up on top though...

Whats frustrating and worse than having to fix someone else's code (half completed project) ? 😓😓

Nothing like trying to fix a product breaking bug in someone else's code that just ran off on vacation for a week. 😒

When you are changing and updating your code update your comments/docs also, there's nothing worse than getting confused by someone else's code to find that the comments/docs are wrong

Whenever I reach the point where static analysis can't help me any further I always feel a sort of thrill mixed with terror. This is the real deal. Until now the problems were easy to find, the questions had well defined answers to choose from, the rules were universal. In the part of the logic that cannot be checked, the invariants upheld manually, where the best the type system can enforce is for the programmer to clearly state what they're doing, lies the real beast. In proofs commented on functions or invariants as logical expressions over plain English variables written in the doc comments of a struct.

In the blurry and pompous future I imagine for software development, that's where the programmer's time will be spent. Once we all agree on what a string is, what it means to depend on someone else's code, and what parts a UI should be made of, all a developer should have to do is make decisions and derive proofs an automated deduction engine can't do on its own.

Doing someone else's Code Review in my project: "You must retain the holiness and piety of the code you write by following PascalCase naming for files and kebab-case naming for CSS variables. Avoid using duplicate strings by declaring enums in a constants.ts file and using that all throughout the app"

During my own Code Review in someone else's project: "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN I CANNOT PASS FUNCTION REFERENCES AS PROPS TO A REACT COMPONENT AND ALWAYS NEED TO INVOKE IT INSIDE AN INLINE FUNCTION FOR THE PROP."
"WHAT KINDA FKIN DRUGS ARE YOU ON TO USE snake_case IN TYPESCRIPT DID YOUR MOM DROP YOU ON YOUR HEAD WHEN YOU WERE BORN YOU SACRILEGIOUS PIECE OF SHIT"
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN I SHOULD USE BOTH SINGLE AND DOUBLE QUOTES FOR IMPORTS AS PER LOCAL OR GLOBAL; I'LL SHOVE THE SINGLE QUOTE UP YOU WHERE THE SUN DOESN'T SHINE YOU FKIN DEGENERATE MORON"

As much as I do believe in self righteousness of my own coding conventions over others (I might be slightly better than others but I really can't claim good authority because I've had my lapses in conventions too; and being one of the newer members of the team certainly doesn't help, despite my boss supporting my initiative), I guess it is high time we bring in some already established code conventions in the team that is finally big enough to warrant them. Maybe AirBnB.

My team has a pathological need to NOT comment! What the fuck!! I think it is because a lot of it is actually magic, so they don't want to admit ignorance. My code is full of "not sure why it works, but breaks when removed." Chunks. That way, when debugging, I actually know what is going on????

I am currently going through and editing someone else's code, and I see code that has no clear purpose, even when removed! Does it do something I don't see??? Does it do nothing?? Fuck!

So there is this owner team who reviewed my code recently. I don't have much context about the their system and architecture. We try to build our changes with less context and rely in owner team's knowledge for any review gap.
The guy from the owner team missed something in my review and changes went to prod, review already took more that it was expected to take. He took 1 week for small change reviews. Now, not him but with someone else's advice they had to revert.
I wrote a mail shooting to manager, the guy who reverted and the guy who reviewed, asking the reviewer guy to explain why didn't he mentioned about any issues at the time of the review.
I have tried best from my side. But all this, god!!!
Why everything I do has some kind of weird issue. I feel so bad blaming the guy, I just think that, the way I used to feel anxious he must be feeling the same, but what can I do? I don't want to take the blame I don't even see if I can and I shouldn't be. If it was a major issue it should have been raised but he didn't. I feel so bad that I am almost crying, I am feeling that like always I am going to be judged by my team that work is slow and on top of that I can't do anything for the guy I blamed it on.

I don't know, is it my mistake? but I cannot think of anyway I would have known this.

I have a very little working experience with someone else's code, and even lesser experience working with a professional code base. All my previous apps had around 8-9 java files at max, with very rare moduling and folders.
And this start up where am currently the intern, has handed me theiir develop branch, it has almost a 100 java files, 50 external libs, massive use of architectural designs ,data binding and custom views and so much more ! Damn, am overwhelmed , but so excited to learn the practices i was procrastinating for so long 💗💗💗
The only problem is lack of a mentor, since the sir who made this beauty is a superman who is currently handling the server and ai side and isn't usually available.
But i guess i will do fine, hell it's a FBI's data key in my hands :D

When you build off of someone else's base code and there are unnecessarily complex levels of inheritance 🤔

About 20 hours. We had a major campaign for a product launch back in the days when MSN Messenger was awesome. Hitting F5 in MS sql query analyzer to execute query again would show like 20K+ downloads each time, shit was crazy. Then we discovered a major fuck up. Turned out that someone made a mistake by making a guid static. In a personalized content generator. So, most users ended up with someone else's face inside their personalized MSN Messenger wink. Oops... and no, we didn't do code reviews nor TDD back then so we didn't discover it sooner. It was really awesome to see how much traffic MS could generate by just showing a banner in hotmail. Real crazy. Anyway, we fixed it, discovery of the actual problem did take some time though.

What is a open source project you can recommended looking at? I would like to go trough a project written in either C or Python to learn more about how bigger projects are managed and get used to understanding someone else's code.
I think those are both very important skills that I lack.
I was maybe thinking about git as I've heard it is well documented, but I'm not sure if it is easy enough to understand for me.

I have no clue what I just did.

2 months ago I changed my repository name and today when I attempted to pushed an update I realised I had to update my remote key. Which I did.

Now..my repository now contains someone else's repository and my entire code base is non-existent.

Slightly pissed off that I'm now having to redo the entire work again but at same time I'm kinda amused on how I did this.

Tomorrows meeting couldn't be more messed up

•boss(we are kind a thing now)and her ex sitting at the same table while she tries not to kill him
•me sitting there with someone else's shitty website with 20 day old code to show as a back end (previous dev was a cunt and deleted all copies from everywhere)
•them expecting a junior dev to build a whole accounting package on the 20day old code
•deadline 3weeks
• crying on the inside 😱😱😱

You know when I think back to the ideas I've had and the things I've worked on. I'm having difficulty, with the exception of certain far out projects that were like unattainable, in thinking of anything I've done or thought of that does not involve: data visualization, data gathering, encryption/obfuscation, inventory/storage and/or communication.

am I just unimaginative ?

I did have an idea for a code translator and how it would work and what interfaces you'd have to adopt and how you'd attack implementing things that don't translate well like c++ to js for example. or c++ to c# for that matter ! but I never got far into it. though that would have been attainable as long as you had easy ways of generating bindings.

i mean pathing and navigation were things I thought of too but... that would pretty much be implementing someone else's stuff