At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

sudo apt-get random-tool

Traceback (most recent call last):

Aborting because there's a fork in the spoon compartment on line 43 in main

Error this script only works on Python 2.7 and maybe 4.1 on line 59 in main

Missing symbols when trying to decipher Sumerian recipe for steamed vegetables on line 67 in main

Cannot open shared object: Your OS is a bully and is hiding my files on line 98 in main

Are you sure all directories matching ^(/)?([^/\0]+(/)?)+$ are in your $PATH on line 268 in main

Your computer is kind of vibrating in an annoying way on line 332 in main

Failing because I'm feeling insecure please hold me on line 587 in main

I'm feeling confused about my sentience when running TensorFlow models on line 682 in main

FUCK

HAS ANYONE EVER MANAGED TO JUST FUCKING INSTALL A PYTHON BASED APPLICATION WITHOUT DEBUGGING RANDOM COMPUTER STATE SHIT AND DEPENDENCIES FOR THREE HOURS?

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"

Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.

Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.

Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.

I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.

I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.

I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.

I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.

pussy > code
Fuck you.

That's actually something that happened fairly recently.. just that I didn't have the energy left at the time to write it down. That, or I got my ass too drunk to properly write anything.. not sure actually.

So on paper I'm unemployed, but I do spend some time still on pretty much voluntary work for HackingVision, along with a handful of other people.

At the time, we were just doing the usual chit-chat in the admin channel, me still sick in my bed (actually that means that I wasn't drunk but really tired for once.. amazing!) and catching up to what happened, but unable to do any useful work in this sick state. So, tablet, typing on glass, right. I didn't have any keyboard attached at the time.

One of the staff members (a wanketeer from India) apparently had an assignment in a few hours for which he needed to write a server application in Java. Now, performance issues aside, I figured.. well I've got quite a bit of experience with servers, as well as some with client-server protocols. So I got thinking.. mail servers, way too overengineered. Web servers.. well that could work, I've done some basic netcat webservers that just sent an HTTP 200 OK and the file, those worked fine.. although super basic of course. And then there's IRC, which I've actually talked to an InspIRCd server through telnet before (which by the way is pretty much the only thing that telnet is still useful for, something that was never its purpose, lol) and realized that that protocol is actually quite easy to develop around. That's why I like it so much over modern chat protocols like XMPP, MQTT and whatnot. So I recommended that he'd write a little IRC server in Java. Or even just a chatbot like I attempted to at the time, considering that that's - with a stretch of course - a sort-of server too.

His fucking response however, so goddamn fucking infuriating. "If the protocol is so easy, then please write me down how to implement it in Java."

Essentially do his fucking work for him. I don't know Java, but as a fucking HackingVision admin, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT HACKERS CAN'T STAND LAZY CUNTS THAT CAN'T EVEN BE ASSED TO GOOGLE SHIT!!! If I wanted to deal with cunts like that, I'd have opened the page inbox with all its Fb h4xx0ring questions, not the fucking admin chat!

And type it on a goddamn fucking piece of glass, while fucking sick?! Get your ass fucked by a bobs and vegana horny fuck from the untouchable caste, because that's where you fucking belong for expecting THAT from me, you fucking bhenchod.

But at least I didn't get my ass enraged like that to say that to him in the admin chat. Although that probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, to get his feet right back on the ground again.

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

The lead dev left the company two weeks ago. His last hurrah involved committing a bunch of complicated code into our API. The code he writes is generally overly coupled but this particular code is INSANE.
It is so coupled that the tests for it almost mock the entire application end to end. I only found this heap of garbage when the deployment tests were hung after I made a simple change in a totally unrelated file. THEY DIDNT FAIL. JEST GOT INTO A STATE WHERE IT CANT CONCLUDE AND HAS NO ERROR MESSAGES. We are taking about entirely different parts of the code. As far apart in the code as it can get. It took six hours of playing Sherlock Holmes to figure out what was breaking.

He got the most junior developer to approve the garbage PR as well.

I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.

Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.

I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)

To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"

I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....

No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net

I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.

Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#

This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.

Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.

Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.

Three months into a new job, as a senior developer (12+ years experience) and updated an import application.

With one small update query that didn't account for a possible NULL value for a parameter, so it updated all 65 million records instead of the 15 that belonged to that user.

Took 3 people and 4 days to put all the data back to it's original state.

Went right back to using the old version of the apllication, still running 2 years later. It's spaghetti code from hell with sql jobs and multiple stored procedures creating dynamic SQL, but I'm never touching it again.

Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀

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.

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

I call this one the tester than knew too much.

Note: The server the tester is running on has a hard drive that is breaking down...

Tester: Remember the error I talked to you about yesterday?

Me: Yeah, what about it?

Tester: Well the server hasn't recovered yet and I haven't restarted anything...

Me: Well the application itself hasn't crashed so our monitoring application doesn't seem to notice that the service is in a bad state. The error seems only to have brought down certain threads within the application.

Tester: No, I think there is a different issue here and has nothing to do with that error, the application is still doing things.
*tails the log*
Tester: See?

Me: As I said some things are still running and are unaffected by the error.

Tester: NO! It has to be caused by the other error I had a week ago where my file got corrupted. As we said I removed the file, restarted it and it worked again, but had the same problem a day later...

Note: The problem is not related, this time the application is running out of file descriptors

Me: Well... If the problem is the same it would have complained about the file descriptors then aswell, not an I/O error.

Tester: Nope, I think you are wrong!

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FML

Anybody else interested in a feature to save the state/amount of "scroll" when accidentally leaving the application?

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

Worst code I ever had to touch: a React application, createClass era, before redux was a thing, that had everything in one fucking component.

Every fucking thing.

This was a simple video chat application, but still. The component's code included:

- Views (contact list and video call screen) and logic to switch between them;
- All application state;
- API calls;
- Websocket message handling;
- WebRTC logic (getUserMedia and p2p streaming).

This app was built by one person in one month for a demo. That person left the company after the demo and I had to maintain that mess without zero React knowledge (I was doing angular at that time). On his last day he gave me a crash course and an overview of how the app worked.

Around that time I attended a few meetups and a conference with talks about React. That, my curiosity and ability to learn by refactoring helped me a lot when I had to add new features and fix bugs in that app.

Web development:
I'm honestly happy that my toxic "senior" colleague is gone.
- Didnt learn a single thing in the last 10 years. Used godamn serverside rendering with Jquery / plain JS for a highly interactive business Web Application. Yeah boii, save that UI state in the relational database, good job.
- Every error in his shit was the error of someone else.
- Manipulative as hell. Type of guy that is your best buddy to gather information.
- Blocked entire technical progress in the Web department by manipulating people. Understandable. I mean if your legacy shit is gone...
- Kept backend developers from doing their job with unjustified complaints about structures... etc to justify that he needed an insane amount of time to implement simple things.
- Cried for every shit to be documented to the last bits. Did never do any documentation himself.

Fuck these people, honestly.

Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Love the topic, and I have multiple.

We were designing a frontend for a new application and we were using University lingo for the text placeholders. I forgot to remove one section in which the text stated "You are looking to enroll in the University of Deez Nuts", on another section I left "Click here cuh". Our manager at the time liked the design so much, but forgot to check for spelling or texts and as such sent the demo to our entire department. Everyone saw it, and while they all found it funny it could have seriously gone wrong. Thankfully our department VP had a pretty good sense of humor.....dude also knew exactly who it was from the start.

On another application, a director, who is a friend, asked for multiple items on a request form, during testing, I added text in Spanish (I am in Texas, but Spanish is pretty well known and spoken in the state) saying "Que bien chinga <Name of the Director>" which roughly translates to "<Name of the Director> is being annoyong" (but in a very Mexican spanish way)
I neglected to consider that the dude was probably viewing the admin board and checking the items as they were being added to the system and he called me not even 3 minutes later saying "You know I can see what you add right??"

All in all, I was pretty lucky because in any other places I would have been severely reprimanded :P

There are many more, but these came at the top of my head as the better ones.

Finally finished the longest ticket I've ever worked on in my life. The ticket title and description was a pretty simple and straightforward one: "Upgrade from PHP 7.4 to 8".

If it was only so simple in real life. Our application is mostly done with API Platform framework, which is based on top of Symfony framework which is based on top of PHP language.

Once I did PHP 7 => 8 upgrade I needed to upgrade API Platform 2 => 3. But of-course that couldn't have been done as before that I needed to upgrade from Symfony 5 => 6.

This all was literally an equivalent of touching into a wasp nest - it took me a bit over 5 months and 800 hours of work and there was literally not a single source file left untouched.

In the process of all of this I've ran into literally dozen undocumented feature-breaking changes, broken backwards-compatibility promises and inside out architectural changes - from both the frameworks and the language itself.

Upgrading just one major version of anything SHOULD NOT be so hard. And to top it all up just to think I will need to do this again in a year or two..

Experiences like these really set my hate for time-based model of releases and the state of today's development in general.

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

The moment someone says Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface instead of RESTAPI.

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

I'm curious...
I ended up in a job in which I'm the sole developer (state education databases). Good, well paying job. No complaints there, but I haven't been part of a Dev team since my college days almost 15 years ago. I keep up my skills in personal projects.

I use git, like most developers these days, to track my code and move it between my desktop and laptop. However, while I have a GitHub account, I tend to be very"shy" with my code. I usually won't start putting the repository online until the application I'm working on has its intended cute functionality at least... Functional.

That said, I've read articles that suggest developers should almost start their project repositories online right from the start.

My question is... Are there any others like me, holding back their code until it's functional, or do most of you code completely in public (for open source projects, anyway)?

So, I've been reading all this complaints about micro services which started to be loud thanks to the mad CEO of Twitter.
Keep reading but I am curious about your opinion as well

To me all the point of micro services has never been about improving the speed, in fact it might have a negative impact on the performances of an application. I think that given the calculation power we have nowdays, it's not a big deal

However on the other side, it makes all the rest so much easier.
When there's a problem on one service, I can just debug the given service without spending hours starting a huge slow turtle
If something goes down, it doesn't make unhealthy the whole app, and if I am lucky it's not gonna be a critical service (so very few people will be pissed).
I have documentation for each of them so it's easier to find what I am looking for.
If I have to work on that particular service, I don't have to go through thousands of tangled lines of code unrelated to each other but instead work on an isolated, one-purpose service.
Releasing takes minutes, not hours, and without risk of crashing everything.

So I understand the complaint about the fact that it's making the app run slower but all the rest is just making it easier.

Before biting my ass, I am not working at Twitter, I don't know the state of their application (which seems to be extremely complicated for an app deigned to post a bit of text and a few pictures), but in a company with skilled people, and a well designed architecture.

Jesus, I'm SO fed up with this mindless application of CRUD. This application would literally be less than half its current size if we weren't implementing crud for fucking broken device reports and repair offers, stuff that should have many states, a create action strictly bound to a user type and view/field wise edit phases bound to a state-usertype pair.

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".

Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".

Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.

The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.

There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.

One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.

This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.

For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.

On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.

I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.

Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story.

Me and the lead developer of my team gave a long and detailed explanation to our manager entailing the current state of a budge program our workplace uses.

This app has been bugging him for a while, he did not write it and has not been given an opportunity to rewrite the damned thing. Its a really...really messy application, and whilst it is a functional one it most certainly is NOT an efficient one since adding or moving things only incites more spaghetti mess.

We were laughing while giving our report, but both of us were crying inside. The main thing is, we both love PHP and the things he has built are very well structured and efficient, he has good technique, but will admit at certain caveats regarding the way he structures his dbs stating that he always has to do changes, which hey, its the nature of the beast, dbs change all the time. But our issue with php is the same: it lets beginners write monstruosities that are harder to do in other environments.

It really is a permissive language. But I reckon thay such lax nature is better left at the hands of the more experieced developers that know what they are doing.

Either way, we will restructure this motherfucker taking advantage of the new standards (which both of us are well versed in) and applying a more structured approach with a nice frontend interface (we be looking at Vue.js and React although we are considering Angular as well)

Gon be some good times.

I can now appreciate some design decisions behind react-redux after witnessing some angular OOP clusterfuck.

I am sure there is some clean/correct way to code in angular, but everyone is treating angular as java.

Some angular application (the one I have to work with) is littered with network calls. It's difficult to spot duplicates. People usually resolve promises everywhere. In services, in a top-level component, or in for loops. In react, people use apollo/redux-query or redux-saga to handle network calls. Since these libraries prevent duplicate network calls internally and reassigning apollo network call function or redux action function is always useless, it's easy to spot all network calls in a component tree.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data mutations when data can be updated everywhere. In react, you can easily find UI state updates by tracing state hooks/dispatch/apollo usages.

In angular, it's difficult to trace data pipeline. Since everything is imperative by default, people need to add update functions in data subscriptions. With all the littered mutations. Soon you will lose track of what the fuck is going on.

I hope angular get the agonizing death it deserves and fuck everyone who codes JS OOP clusterfuck UI.

Microsoft is always at it.

Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.

So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.

Windows 10 users, do this:

Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....

How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?

I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.

Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?

But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)

So needless to say she needs help. All the time.

So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.

I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.

Wanna know why?

Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:

- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer

Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe

And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.

So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!

So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.

I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.

I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!

However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.

So I inherited this buggy application my company developed to process state rosters for health care. The daily process fails often and I haven’t been able to figure out why. Then I notice one little thing... it’s essentially using SQL injection as a method of updating records from a file that we receive from outside... there’s no checking for validity of the statements or making sure they’re safe to execute. Just a for in loop and calling a sp to execute the query text under elevated permissions.

Why?! Why do companies need to build a useless application for their product every... single... time? It's not like I'm going to watch the state of my (future) pension every single day, I only want to update my personal information.

(I kinda get why, but still, you can get similar features out of a PWA as well, which is less annoying for the end user)

I've been writing on this TCP server the last few days to integrate our software with some services used by the rest of the company.
Noticed the company service keeps making a new connection for every single message, and closes this at client side (without signifying the server).

So I contact the team who wrote these services and ask them what's happening. Team lead of that team doubts that I know what I'm talking about and tells me TCP automagically signals the server on disconnect, and this probably is a .Net only problem.

5 seconds of googlefu: half open tcp connection.

Apparently, the application doesn't care about dropped connections and losing connection states even though every service should be checked for licensing when connecting to the server. With this set-up everyone can just send a message other than the registration and pass through any 'validation' due to the fact there can be no connection state.

F*CKING INEPT IDIOT(S) OF TEAM LEAD/DEVELOPER TEAM!

An eventful day:
Because of my recent amateur thermopaste application onto a heatpipe that connects a laptop CPU and a discrete GPU and *ingenious* HP ProBook engineering my Radeon graphics have fried yesterday.

On the bright side, got the Nougat update for my Samsung S6, with bright hopes that it will help restore the state of an unresponsive fingerprint scanner... nope, that is still broken.

Summer is near, exams finished, time for some DIY on used and abused tech! :D

I've been helping a friend of mine with his postgraduate project the last 3 months.
It was a Java based program made in Processing. Though I am not a Java developer and I never used processing before, it wasn't that hard to write the logic of the program.

I noticed that sometimes Java made me use loops for almost everything.
Also I had to communicate between server and client via JSON but I had to write it manually as string due to the lack of keys in Java.

The main trial though was with the logic of the project. It was supposed to be made as a framework to be extended from custom user classes. I had to change the core classes I made many times because the user class had methods that should run while the parent class didn't have them declared. That could be my fault for not knowing how to write desktop application framework but you can't expect a framework to be extended in a compiled state, or so I think. Processing on the other hand doesn't seem to like the idea of an external java library. At least it didn't workout for me, it should be able to work normally.

In the end the project was never as completed as we wanted. It could rum a basic sim but we hadn't the time to test other possibilities.

Question.js
How do I create a simple store for state management. I don't want to use redux. I achieved most of things I wanted I'm kinda stuck at something. Here say the store
obj = { attr1 : { some : { nested : ["json"] } } }
I used setter in es6 to avoid writing to attr1 after attr1 is set.
My dilemma here is how do I freeze the nested object being changed? I tried various ways arround Object.freeze. it didn't work. I'm looking for some way I can do it? Or someone can help me understand redux or vuex without going through all of their code.

Is it fine to manage React states on your own ( kinda lifting up the state way ) in a medium size application? I've built 70% of the application without a lot of trouble. The only problem is there's no way to pass states to the sibling components without lifting up the state and lifting up the states decreases the modularity of the code. A lot of functions (handlers) have to be re-written in different components.

Would I be better off using Redux, etc. Thoughts?

Is it any coincidence that IBM's application container is called WAS. In other words their product is past tense. As in it wasn't even state of the art when it released.

Some long thoughts about state of desktop operating systems.

I always hated window management on desktop. There is basically no difference in usability between mobile and desktop in terms of application management. There is still finite amount of apps you can have in focus and you need to switch between them so they’re left from your screen.

What you end up is finite amount of screens you can connect into your computer or pounding switch context shortcut every other second.

We pushed computing so far and screen resolutions doubled from 1024x768 but the active desktop size is still the same.

For me adding additional display to laptop is not an option. What I love with remote work is that I can lay in my bed or on sofa or wherever I want to and write some code. My point is I don’t want to be stuck to my desk if I want to write / debug something.

Back to the desktop I think there is missing part of our state of desktop right now. The most we have are virtual desktops we can switch between but we can’t get parts of two desktops on same screen.

What I would love to test / develop is smooth infinite desktop with pinch and zoom - drag and drop navigation between my apps.

The problematic thing is determination of where user want’s to focus - is it fullscreen app or multiple apps on same screen and how to handle partially visible windows.

But I would love to test it. Maybe one day I switch to linux desktop just to try to implement the infinite desktop as an alternative to virtual desktops.

Maybe some rich frustrated kid would make it someday while I’m stuck at working my shit ass to pay for being able to have a decent life on this fucking planet…
I wish I can retire to focus on such things.

I tend to overengineer. Why? Because I had a view in JavaFX with its controller that had a bunch of key listeners which changed the UI. I wanted to change the view based on wifi connection/no connection with a server, which was managed in a Client class. The controller took the client to give it a message that client then had to send. For "separation of concerns" I created a separate view + controller for the "not connected" state.
Now the Client knew all about the connection, so I put up the Observer pattern and wanted the Main (Application) class to swap the layouts as an Observer of the Client. After an Exception on FX thread and Platform.runLater(), to solve the issue, I faced a new problem: the key presses weren't executed anymore. I still don't know why this happens. Maybe I'm missing something.🤷
Then met with one of my group partners (it's a uni project):
Let's attach the Observer to the original controller. Have only the original view that changes due to the controller updates as Observer. Let's see if that might even remotely work...🤔
It worked🤦😂

What the hell is the point of this small projects team spending 2-3 months on developing extensive logging system for an internal application for inside and outside customers to use if your application isn’t going to log any of the fucking errors. Sure you write the failure status to the database, but it just says failure with an even more vague explanation than microsoft’s errors. “An error occurred”. No shit, that’s why I’m looking in the logs and database to debug the application to get these files on their merry way so our company can stay in compliance with the state, feds, and not pay out the wazzoo in fines. All our other applications state where the error occured such as “failed to connect to the email server”, why can’t this one.

CREA DDF (Canada Real state listings API) is what you get when government fucks with technology.

Holy shit! So f*cking inefficient to use it, test it and get data.

I get the protection behind sensitive data but fuck me if there is not a lot of waiting behind their fucking application process just to fetch some testing data.

Damn, history web API really sucks for SPAs that have a hierarchical navigation structure.

For example there's no built-in way to know whether the back or forwards button were clicked, only that one of them was clicked.

And if you reload the page, any state you pushed remains in the history stack. So the user might not be able to go back in your application anymore, but they can still press the browser back button and all those states you pushed will be fucking up your navigation system

I had serious depednecy problems for a while. I couldn't find anything similar on the stackoverflow so I had to figure it out myself, so after some planning I found it out that I have to replace a complete module to reach the full potential of the application. To reach the desired speed and the correct output I had to split the input in two and then run one side trough an external module which made some state changes on one part of the input data, then the application merge the output with the rest and returns every single drop in a nice processed way. It works quite well, the user can decide in what percentage of the data shall be processed to get the desired output and the right state. I am really happy with the end result. The picture of the result in the comment.

Is it just me or is python community's dependency management a bit unreliable?

I just can't seem to easily install any python programs without missing dependencies. Updates have caused libraries to become incompatible, which in turn causes the application that used to work to just produce a stack trace.

Is this the state of python or am I doing something wrong.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y700 (and possibly (m)any other NVidia GPU laptops)

framerate fluctuations in any game - runs silky smooth for few minutes, then drops to borderline unplayable framerates for a few minutes.

Thousands of people across dozens, maybe hundreds of internet forums having this problem for years, since the thing was released.

I personally lost at least 20 hours trying to solve it, and had the laptop in gaming-unusable state because of it for the past half a year.

...yesterday I FOUND A SOLUTION!
1. Download NVidia Inspector by Orbmu2k
(some hobbyist hacker type)

2. use its "profile inspector" to flip an internal setting in nvidia driver.

3. flip "Enable application for Optimus" to SHIM_RENDERING_MODE_ENABLE to basically tell the "Optimus" crap to fuck off.
(not sure why the value is called this, because it's clearly disabling the thing)

4. the thing works flawlessly silky smooth again.

...thousands of people across dozens, maybe hundreds of forums...
...i could be their Lord and Savior...
...if only I weren't too lazy to hike across all of them and register just to post the solution.
(tech forums really should have some "I HAVE A SOLUTION but if i have to register I won't bother")

also...
WHY
DO
WE
KEEP
LETTING
HW
MANUFACTURERS
WRITE
SOFTWARE?!?

Guys is that the case, that it is such a hassle to work with forms in React-Redux application?! Hell, it takes a lot of time to just create a simple form with like 3 lines of inputs.

Everytime I need to setup bunch of those Actions that will fire on a field value change, than selectors to pick from the state and send to the backend with redux-saga. OMG OMG OMG.

Redux-forms kind a struggle to setup too at first, but I guess I have to go for it anyway?

Alright, could someone with more experience tell me if nowadays the job application requirement of "x years experience needed" is something fixed or flexible?

My friends say: "That's the ideal candidate, but they are flexible if need be." but I see employers these days state that the x years experience is in fact mandatory and required.

So.. who can demystify this for me? : )

Back when I was starting out in a full stack role, I worked on a fairly big chunk of functionality that would trigger off a few entry points. It was wonderful for a few months. As we approached go live, our QA team started reporting weird intermittent issues. The logic wouldn't "trigger" the first time, but would on subsequent saves. Worse yet, the state required resetting of data every time we needed to test. Three weeks later, it boiled down to a 2 second time difference between the database's GETDATE() values and the new Date() object we passed in from our application.

I'll never forget that one system should be the source of truth again.

As a TV OS developer, I'm interested in enhancing the user experience by providing more granular control over applications. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:

Monitor the current state of an application, such as whether it's open, paused, or playing.

Interact with the application's UI elements, like buttons, menus, and sliders.

Control the application's media playback, including starting, pausing, stopping, and seeking.

Are there any existing APIs or frameworks within the TV OS ecosystem that would enable me to achieve these goals? If so, could you please provide more details on their capabilities and limitations?

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#Suphle Rant 6: Deptrac, phparkitect

This entry isn't necessarily a rant but a tale of victory. I'm no more as sad as I used to be. I don't work as hard as I used to, so lesser challenges to frustrate my life. On top of that, I'm not bitter about the pace of progress. I'm at a state of contentment regarding Suphle's release

An opportunity to gain publicity presented itself last month when cfp for a php event was announced last month. I submitted and reviewed a post introducing suphle to the community. In the post, I assured readers that I won't be changing anything soon ie the apis are cast in stone. Then php 7.4 officially "went out of circulation". It hit me that even though the code supports php 8 on paper, it's kind of a red herring that decorators don't use php 8 attributes. So I doubled down, suspending documentation.

The container won't support union and intersection types cuz I dislike the ambiguity. Enums can't be hydrated. So I refactored implementation and usages of decorators from interfaces to native attributes. Tried automating typing for all class properties but psalm is using docblocks instead of native typing. So I disabled it and am doing it by hand whenever something takes me to an unfixed class (difficulty: 1). But the good news is, we are php 8 compliant as anybody can ask for!

I decided to ride that wave and implement other things that have been bothering me:
1) 2 commands for automating project setup for collaborators and user facing developers (CHECK)
2) transferring some operations from runtime to compile/build TIME (CHECK)
3) re-attempt implementing container scopes

I tried automating Deptrac usage ie adding the newly created module to the list of regulated architectural layers but their config is in yaml, so I moved to phparkitect which uses php to set the rules. I still can't find a library for programmatically updating php filed/classes but this is more dynamic for me than yaml. I set out to implement their library, turns out the entire logic is dumped into the command class, so I can neither control it without the cli or automate tests to it. I take the command apart, connect it to suphle and run. Guess what, it detects class parents as violations to the rule. Wtflyingfuck?!

As if that's not bad enough, roadrunner (that old biatch!) server setup doesn't fail if an initialization script fails. If initialization script is moved to the application code itself, server setup crumbles and takes the your initialization stuff down with it. I ping the maintainer, rustacian (god bless his soul), who informs me point blank that what I'm trying to do is not possible. Fuck it. I have to write a wrapper command for sequentially starting the server (or not starting if initialization operations don't all succeed).

Legitimate case to reinvent the wheel. I restored my deleted decorators that did dependency sanitation for me at runtime. The remaining piece of the puzzle was a recursive film iterator to feed the decorators. I checked my file system reader for clues on how to implement one and boom! The one I'd written for two other features was compatible. All I had to do was refactor decorators into dependency rules, give them fancy interfaces for customising and filtering what classes each rule should actually evaluate. In a night's work (if you're discrediting how long writing the original sanitization decorators and directory iterator), I coupled the Deptrac/phparkitect library of my dreams. This is one of the those few times I feel like a supreme deity

Hope I can eat better and get some sleep. This meme is me after getting bounced by those three library rejections