Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?
- Sure! What do you need?
Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.
- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?
I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.
- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.
You know that doesn’t make sense right?
- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.
Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.
- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!
But it’s just two lines.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel!
Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...
- One component per file!
I’m lost.
- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.
Doesn’t Javascript include that already?
- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.
What’s ECMAScript?
- Javascript
Why is it called ECMAScript then?
- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.
What does that have to do with my page?
- So you can install AngularJS.
What’s AngularJS?
- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!
Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?
- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.
Then why make two way data binding in the first place?
- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?
I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?
- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.
But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?
- You mean 3.
2.
- 3.
4?
- 5.
6?
- Exactly.
Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.
- That’s good.
Really?
- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.
I did.
- But did you use TypeScript?37 -
This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.
TL;DR Network upgrade
Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.
At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.
The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.
Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.
One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)
One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.
The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.
The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.
The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.
The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)
The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)
What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.
The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...10 -
Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.
It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.
Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.
This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.
Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.
I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)
Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.
By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.
Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.
Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.
It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.
I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.6 -
Building a business can hamper one's development urges!
I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.
So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.
On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(
Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!
I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊5 -
Manager: How's (insert dumbass task that they assigned literally 1 hour ago) going? 😊
Dev: We have JIRA for a reason, you'll see it will be moved to demo / review when it's ready.
Manager: ...
Dev: ...2 -
Workload rant.
Our new line manager is overly expecting from all of us (product/design/tech) and is micro managing on ground level without having any real sense of reality. He just wants everything to be built overnight.
He is smart, no doubt about that. But guess, I learnt from him what I had to. Not to stereotype but he is a typical Indian manager who keeps pushing boundaries.
He just added 80 features for Q1 roadmap with on 3 PMs, 1 Designer, 1TPM, and bunch of techies .
What the actual fuck! 😂😂😂 And he wanted to add more, thankfully we ran out of time in the meeting.
And my super talent and genius blabbering co-woker who works mechanically just fucked herself real bad. Lol
I kept telling her not to add Feature XYZ to the roadmap because:
1. There'll be spill over from Q4
2. She is already overloaded with 1 task and keeps crying all day about being unable to handle it
3. She is setting wrong expectations with management for herself and rest of the team
4. Boss will add more work and she'll be fucked
She was adamant and did not listen.
Now this is what happened:
1. ALL her Q4 items got pushed to Q1. LMFAO
2. She was literally crying since morning on calls for being overloaded and we are yet to start Q1 assignments
3. Additional tasks along side feature XYZ were added on her plate
I tried to push back the manager and that's when he said okay, let's keep some items for Q2.
But holy shit. 80 features between such a small team and wanted to done in few weeks.
I need to pump more steam in my job hunt activity. This place is ridiculously toxic.33 -
# 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.18 -
!tech (sorta)
I am a 24yo Software Engineer guy and had just started working professionally 2 years ago, and most of my work life went in WFH due to covid. Before that, my college was also near to my home, so i have never left my home for more than a few hours to do studies.
Life had went pretty smoothly so far but now I see a lot of hurdles coming into my path . i am 24 and don't have a license for even a 2 wheeler. I don't have a good idea of my own city (but fortunately it has a great infrastructure , so i know how to travel via public transport to anywhere easily). mainly I don't know how to live alone.
The worst thing currently happening for me is that my company is transforming from WFH to WFO. The office is in a different metropolitan city which is crazy expensive and short on space. I already am uncomfortable with the idea living on my own but the thoughts of sharing a room/bed with some other guy and having my savings cut from 90 to 50% is worse.
i am hopeful that the financial hit will not be that bad as appraisals are coming, but this picture of hustle is scary. will i indulge into bad habits (drinking, gambling, smoking)? will i loose my health? would i need to wash my clothes and cook my food everyday? would i even have time to think and watch some web series, video tutorial? would i cut cost everywhere? every thing is scary. the market is also very bad right now, i am not getting any interviews even after applying to many places.
how do you prepare yourself to live away from home? Also , how do you prepare your family to live away from you?
(for 2nd question, i am a single child of a nuclear family with rarely any relatives or friends. my parents , especially my mom have been super involved in my life and we both have an exteem8 attachment to each other. i have recently started going away for short trips and travels, but she gets super emotional and concerned on thinking about me living and managing things on my own , away from her)5 -
Nothing much to ready today, keep scrolling..
I just asked you to keep scrolling, I am using this space to think out loud...
Damn you bloody rebel.. whatever..
Finally after a rough week, festivals, interviews, work stress, and pending tasks, I got a free weekend for myself to be with myself.
I managed to do bare minimum at work. My new line manager isn't quite pleased with how team and I am functioning but whatever.
On Fridays, I usually end the day early and start with personal tasks. I managed to finish some long pending activities.
Today, I was able to do a deep cleaning of digital housekeeping. Sorted some clashes with parents. manage to de-stress and relax my stiff neck muscles.
Apart from that I guess, I am all prepared to interview and get hired for a company on foreign land. I am confident that I can relocate to EU.
And for now, I am actively pursuing two of my hobbies, Music and Finances. I love managing my finances and learning more about technical aspects of audio and listening to more and more music.
I feel happier, relaxed, and calm. Having things under control is such a wonderful feeling.
And I am slowly building a framework to earn, manage, invest, and grow my finances. It's turning out really well. I have setup the base infrastructure.
For music, I have figured the fundamentals and now I will go out buy myself an DAC/AMP to build a portable rig.
This shit is so awesome and makes me happy. I am able to socialise at the end of each day so that keeps me going during the lock-down phase.
I have figured the top key and important things to do at work for my profile and I actually enjoy those.
1. Product discovery - talking to users/customers and finding their pain areas and opportunities to build the solution
2. Product vision/strategy - Dreaming on how the product would evolve and laying out a solid plan to materialise those dreams.
3. Roadmap and prioritisation - this should be self explanatory
4. Success metrics - I really want to get into data and I am getting opportunities to do so. This is super fun. This will help me analyse and show the impact of the what we are building and measuring it while making sure that LT recognises my and my teams' efforts.
I want to and I will excel these 4 keys skills of my profile and be more efficient at my job.
This will give me more time to pursue my hobbies (which will change over time and want to enjoy them the most while I am at them).
Guys, after a rough 2021, the end of the year seems promising with a lot of leaves and short vacation coming up.
Apart from all this, what is more important here is that I got the career and life clarity that I was struggling with for past few months.
For whoever has read till here, YOU ARE BLOODY AWESOME and thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me always.
I am grateful to be a part of this community and have awesome friends like you all who have been with me though my ups and downs since 2016.
LOVE YOU ALL :)3 -
I can't say how a CS degree helped me since I dropped out, but in all of my tech related jobs we turn down candidates with a CS degree left and right. Turns out showing up for class and managing to pass doesnt give you real world experience, passion, or even knowledge. I used to be a floor factory worker and my team lead was a CS degree holder.
But hey, maybe the crippling debt and super unrelated classes were worth it.
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View