devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

Search - "someone is getting a good evaluation"

17

AleCx04

28724

4y

One of my employees just gave me a panchito(basically a fried tortilla chip with cheese, avocado and meat) and went away. He legit bought it from the cafeteria, walked all the way to the office to give me one, and left to eat it back at the cafeteria 🤣🤣🤣 bless him.

random someone is getting a good evaluation
4

IntrusionCM

15177

2y

Aka... How NOT to design a build system.

I must say that the winning award in that category goes without any question to SBT.

SBT is like trying to use a claymore mine to put some nails in a wall. It most likely will work somehow, but the collateral damage is extensive.

If you ask what build tool would possibly do this... It was probably SBT. Rant applies in general, but my arch nemesis is definitely SBT.

Let's start with the simplest thing: The data format you use to store.

Well. Data format. So use sth that can represent data or settings. Do *not* use a programming language, as this can neither be parsed / modified without an foreign interface or using the programming language itself...

Which is painful as fuck for automatisation, scripting and thus CI/CD.

Most important regarding the data format - keep it simple and stupid, yet precise and clean. Do not try to e.g. implement complex types - pain without gain. Plain old objects / structs, arrays, primitive types, simple as that.

No (severely) nested types, no lazy evaluation, just keep it as simple as possible. Build tools are complex enough, no need to feed the nightmare.

Data formats *must* have btw a proper encoding, looking at you Mr. XML. It should be standardized, so no crazy mfucking shit eating dev gets the idea to use whatever encoding they like.

Workflows. You know, things like
- update dependency
- compile stuff
- test run
- ...

Keep. Them. Simple.
Especially regarding settings and multiprojects.

http://lihaoyi.com/post/...

If you want to know how to absolutely never ever do it.

Again - keep. it. simple.

Make stuff configurable, allow the CLI tool used for building to pass this configuration in / allow setting of env variables. As simple as that.

Allow project settings - e.g. like repositories - to be set globally vs project wide.

Not simple are those tools who have...
- more knobs than documentation
- more layers than a wedding cake
- inheritance / merging of settings :(
- CLI and ENV have different names.
- CLI and ENV use different quoting
...

Which brings me to the CLI.

If your build tool has no CLI, it sucks. It just sucks. No discussion. It sucks, hmkay?

If your build tool has a CLI, but...
- it uses undocumented exit codes
- requires absurd or non-quoting (e.g. cannot parse quoted string)
- has unconfigurable logging
- output doesn't allow parsing
- CLI cannot be used for automatisation

It sucks, too... Again, no discussion.

Last point: Plugins and versioning.

I love plugins. And versioning.

Plugins can be a good choice to extend stuff, to scratch some specific itches.

Plugins are NOT an excuse to say: hey, we don't integrate any features or offer plugins by ourselves, go implement your own plugins for that.
That's just absurd.
(precondition: feature makes sense, like e.g. listing dependencies, checking for updates, etc - stuff that most likely anyone wants)

Versioning. Well. Here goes number one award to Node with it's broken concept of just installing multiple versions for the fuck of it.
Another award goes to tools without a locking file.
Another award goes to tools who do not support version ranges.
Yet another award goes to tools who do not support private repositories / mirrors via global configuration - makes fun bombing public mirrors to check for new versions available and getting rate limited to death.

In case someone has read so far and wonders why this rant came to be...

I've implemented a sort of on premise bot for updating dependencies for multiple build tools.

Won't be open sourced, as it is company property - but let me tell ya... Pain and pain are two different things. That was beyond pain.

That was getting your skin peeled off while being set on fire pain.

-.-

rant build systems that suck

5
2

ElForritari

389

7y

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

undefined university fml msc cs

2

Top Tags

rant linux code windows fuck i java c programming android dev the is javascript js joke life a python

Weekly Rant

View

Most unrealistic deadline you've had?