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!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!221 -
CS teacher tip of the day:
server side input checks and sanitization are always useless. because nowdays all browsers have javascript enabled by default and nobody disables it. so client-side checks are safe.
me: ***WTF!?!***11 -
We build a backup infrastructure at work to make sure that clients can restore their files and databases themselves when something gets fucked up.
We also have step by step tutorial on how to do this.
Every fucking day we get requests to restore backups.
Mostly used reason is "I'm a technical so I won't understand it".
With all due respect, if you don't understand this and keep asking without even trying, please don't host with us.
Because, if you did as I asked and actually read through the entire article, you would.
In case you're wondering, anytime one of us asks what part they don't understand, that question is simply ignored and they pushing for us restoring it anyways continues.
Sometimes they get angry and want to talk to someone higher up or start complaining that they're paying loads of money already and that it would just take us a second anyways.
If you would read the fucking tutorial/manual instead of trying to eat out your mother's badly shaved pussy and hopefully choke on it while you're at it, you wouldn't come asking us for it.
If you genuinely don't understand this article, feel free to ask but also provide us with cocksucking feedback.
Why do you think you have the right anyways to ask us to do it for free? We maintain the backup infrastructure which definitely isn't cheap but we do it so that you, pubic sniffing weazel, can do this shit on your fucking own.
You're entitled to ask us for help but not for asking us to restore your bullshit for free every freaking time.
Tip: give your parents some condoms. Because that way they hopefully won't reproduce again, we don't need more of you in this universe.7 -
It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.
It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.
The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.
I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.
Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.
I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.
And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."
It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.
I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.
If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.7 -
Programming tip of the day:
Several hours of trial and error can save you many minutes of reading the docs.9 -
Database tip of the day:
Spent hours on Amazon's DynamoDB and ultimately found it couldn't do what I wanted, not without a complicated workaround.
Switched to Mongo and had it working in literally under 5 minutes.
Hooray for Mongo 😀3 -
Best way to handle any exception...
try{
something
} catch(e) {
window.location.href =
"http://stackoverflow.com/search/...]+"
+ e.message;
}8 -
Here's a life hack for you.
If you're ever in need of a whiteboard for drawing/sketching, grab a few white a4 paper sheets, a roll of transparent duct tape, tape both sheets together side-by-side. Cover both sheets with tape
et voila! You have yourself a portable & foldable whiteboard!
The more sheets you involve, the bigger the whiteboard will be :)
P.S. It's very handy!!12 -
Life Hack: don't use alcohol or chemicals, rub off glue residue easily with olive oil / baby oil
Works like a charm and also doesn't break cardboard videogame boxes/ book covers
9 -
A guy with a pretty fucked up aggressive personality.
At that point I already had ...more than a few issues with bald headed aggressive men for other reasons.
So from the beginning I was very wary around him... And his behaviour - sweet talking while you could _feel_ the knifes raining down your neck - made me even more defensive. I avoided him like the plague.
But for better or worse I became his supervisor. I had to work with him.
He made it very evident what he thought of having me as a supervisor - from day one there were very non subtle hints.
Every question turned into a discussion... Every discussion turned into screaming... Every screaming from his side turned into me leaving the room. I've had my anger issues and I don't tolerate such behaviour.
The tip of the iceberg was not only his behaviour, but also his limited knowledge.
He worked > 15 years in the company, me 2.
Guess that played a role, too.
But his knowledge was somewhere between junior to average.
Some of the tasks exploded not only in time because of all the rage tantrums he had - but more because he didn't solve them properly, despite given clear guidance.
Since at that time it was obvious that he either quits or will get fired, we had to look at previous projects.
It wasn't pretty - to state it in a polite way.
Non polite way: A shitfest of the worst kind possible.
All in all - he didn't quit.
Nearly half a year later he had to be fired.
Company couldn't fire him earlier for various (eg law) reasons.
But damn he made that time a living hell.
Rarely a day without screaming, door slamming, discussions that went like "I've checked all my literature, what you're saying is wrong." (without stating what literature, the discussion just turned round and round...) and so on...1 -
I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!
So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?
Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.1 -
Discovered pro tip of my life :
Never trust your code
Achievements unlocked :
Successfully running C++ GPU accelerated offscreen rendering engine with texture loading code having faulty validation bug over a year on production for more than 1.5M daily Android active users without any issues.
History : Recently I was writing a new rendering engineering that uses our GPU pipeline engine.. and our prototype android app benchmark test always fails with black rendering frame detection assertion.
Practice:
Spend more than a month to debug a GPU pipeline system based on directed acyclic graph based rendering algorithm.
New abilities added :
Able to debug OpenGL ES code on Android using print statement placed in source code using binary search.
But why?
I was aware of the issue over a month and just ignored it thinking it's a driver bug in my android device.. but when the api was used by one of Android dev, he reported the same issue. In the same day at night 2:59AM ....
Satan came to me and told me that " ok listen man, here is what I am gonna do with you today, your new code will be going production in a week, and the renderer will give you just one black frame after random time, and after today 3AM, your code will not show GL Errors if you debug or trace. Buhahahaha ahhaha haahha..... Puffff"
And he was gone..
Thanks satan for not killing me.. I will not trust stable production code anymore enevn though every line is documented and peer reviewed. -
Every day I am reminded that some people just refuse to be helped. Today I saw an article in a prominent Facebook WordPress group I belong to. The author was sharing tips on how to improve presentation skills at WordPress conferences. One tip was to ensure no spelling errors exist in your slides. But the article itself, and the author’s bio, had five spelling errors. I pointed that out in the comments. Aaaaaand now I’ve been kicked out of the group.
-
One Pro Tip for all developers :
(in my experience - a short story)
Our team chose agile development. We have items to deliver each sprint.
I was the guy who would always slip in my tasks due to issues that would pop up.
It was due to my own faults, I was less careful and failed to concentrate on one single item when I was working.
I started slipping a lot and my manager started questioning me on my performance. I tried a lot of productivity apps and other methods. Nothing seemed to change my life.
One day, An experienced person in the team said to me,
"Start Going to the gym" and it'll change everything.
I enrolled to the nearest gym and started working out every morning. Had sore arms /legs in the first few days. Nothing seemed to change.
After one week, my work patterns changed. I automatically started to work with a lot of concentration. I still don't know how things changed.
After 2 weeks, everything was completely different.
I was able to complete my sprint tasks in the first few days and started contributing to others work. Got a lot of recognition. My work was recognized a lot and my manager appreciated me.
So this is a real life changer folks.
"start hitting the GYM", and it'll change your life.
Please try it out and tell me how your work patterns change.3 -
I haven't coded anything for months now, maybe 1.5 to 2 years even, because I was struggling with depression and unresolved issues. I'm still not out of it, and I'm not seeing anyone for now because of quarantine, but I've been taking antidepressants during the last months (prescribed by a doctor) and they're beginning to have a good effect. I'm feeling better by the day, and I'm looking forward to seeing a professional and getting better without the medication after the end of the coronacrisis (which isn't something I would have thought sometime ago, so that's encouraging).
Anyway, today I took my laptop and started coding again, and I really liked it, but it really felt like my mind was fucking rusted after all this time. It took me like 3 hours to write 60 limes of code. I know that by keeping coding a bit everyday I will find my old skills again, but I was wondering if you had any tip to ease the start, like doing code exercises, or trying to make a simple project. I'll take any tip to get back on the train again, as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Second question : please comfort me and tell me I'm not the only one who is suffering or has suffered from rusted mind syndrome.4 -
Dev-tip of the day:
Always make sure that your database table fields are long enough to hold the entire third-party API client reference ID, so that the last three characters won’t be cut off..
I’ve been “crying” here while debugging for the last hour because my API function and everything else worked, but the result wasn’t showing up in the third-party application (their API returned a 200), but when I tested it with their API sandbox application, it did show up.. -
This is my frontend tip of the day.
If you have a frontend that consumes an external API:
1) Retrieve the json responses from devtools
2) Save them in your project as json files (trim the data a bit if it's too long)
3) When starting your app with a special env var like MOCK_DATA, make your app mock the data and use your saved json data instead.
You can associate each response with an url regex.
The package fetch-mock mocks fetch really well, it lets through the urls that don't match anything.
This way you can incrementally add responses.
And voila, you have a mode where you have near instant page loads to test things manually, and you also have mocked data ready for testing eg, cypress. -
I recently discovered that you can show "Search tools" option in the mobile version of Google.
Thought I should share it here!
Now I just need to find the "Cached page" option 🤔
2 -
Oh China, you still continue to amuse me... in that special way where i somehow both expect it and am hilariously, breifly shocked... then it's somber, confirming what we know is real/continues to be a societal and cognitive decline trend with no apparent rock bottom, without all-out demise as a near certainty... nor a hail mary play.
... but hey, what better way to digest the real-time info, indicative of something that should be terrifying, but is all too expected, than this unique type of format?
Seriously though, even if it worked amazingly, why would anyone be using it outside in public? Does it require several hours a day? If not, and it was a worthwhile result for you... wouldn't you just make it part of your morning and/or evening routine...even if it had nothing to do with aesthetics, that cant be sanitary... unless you also carry it in a water-tight container or disinfectant and typically bring/use your toothbrush and toothpaste mid-day or at unusual intervals.
I have sooo many more questions about this... and none are relative to who designed/mass produced this, nor the quality of the silicone. As it was developed/produced by the silicone factory ive done great, professional, no bs, business with for about a decade... which is why i waited years to publicly ridicule this contraption.
Fyi- their primary product lines are things like bongs and dab containers; im on the fence of it that makes this better or worse.
Creepy personal truth... i reeeeally wanna know how much that woman got paid... and do to my skill set (ie. Im near utter certainty that i could find her and ask her... likely easily abd definitely without being caught doing anything suspicious. Pro tip: publicly declaring things like this makes it a bit easier to not end up doing it... obvious premeditation adding significantly more to any sentencing.
22 -
Tip of the day:
If you want to keep your E-Mails private from Google, but need a Google Account:
1. Register an E-Mail at tuta.io
2. Use your newly created E-Mail by registering here: https://accounts.google.com/SignUpW...
Enjoy! -
Story of two poor puppies
when my mom returned from market, she saw a puppy with her
siblings surrounded by people choosing which one to take.
she pick one puppy. she's color is grayish black puppy with the tip
of his tail and a place in she's neck.
she whined and cried when she separated from her siblings and Mom.
but she quickly familiarize herself with the new family and place.
she was very happy when we bring her sister we found in the same place.
I take care of them.
I feed, wash and play with the new friends.
we built them a house. they were very happy and playful.
but things started to go downhill all of a sudden.
my parents start to prevent me from playing with them.
they say " We bring the puppies for them to be guards ".
they really hate dogs. they started to lock
the house and the window. they had to pass all day in the
same place
(How BORING) they pee there, eat there sleep there.
Since me and my sis prevented from take care of them, we couldn't
do anything all this only to make them cruel dogs and very unfriendly
to people.
when time pass, they started to forget them.
before yesterday, we remembered that we didn't
give them any food or water for the past 3 DAYS !!!
my sister unlock the door for them and they get out
from the house (~Prison~). they were completely
different. the gray puppy was very tired and depressed
and unhealthily skinny. the sister was fine.
we let them outside for few days when the gray puppy
started to get more and more skinny.
he lies on the floor all the day, when we are nearby, she
only wag it's tail no more.
Today, I wake up only to hear the bad story
the gray puppy, well we found her 0x00DEAD ! ! ! !
immediately after I heard the phrase, I burst into tears
I really couldn't stop crying. I couldn't even see that
cute face 0x00DEAD.
My sister's case was way worse than me. the is still
crying at the time of writing. we didn't see their funeral.
the other puppy was very sad because of her sibling
The Worst part is, we didn't name them or take ANY
photo with them !!! :`(2 -
Modern Web Developer
(To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance")
I am the very model of a modern web developer
I’m quite fluent with JavaScript; An HTML whisperer
My code is clean and elegant, I genuinely innovate
And even know my way around a Promise and async / await
I’m very well acquainted too with matters vector graphical
I understand why SVG coordinates seem magical
And even without Photoshop I elegantly can produce
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
[Chorus]
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
I'm quite adept at ES6 expressions like destructuring
I know the ins and outs of functional reactive programming
In short, in matters browser-based or Node.js if you prefer
I am the very model of a modern web developer
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer
I know our mythic history, the humble start, the browser wars
I know why Douglas Crockford fought the battle over ES4
The World Wide Web Consortium and Ecma International
My knowledge of our legacy is truly supernatural
With LESS and SASS and CSS, designing for mobility
I’ll perfectly apply the right amount of specificity
From custom fonts and parallax to grid and flex and border-box
I know most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
[Chorus]
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
And when it comes to lazy loading, bundling up and splitting code
There’s nothing quite like Webpack, which of course is built on top of Node
Considering my resume, I’m certain that you will concur
I am the very model of a modern web developer
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer
When new frameworks and libraries emerge I must be ravenous
And gobble up the hot new thing, my appetite is bottomless
React and Vue and Angular, Immutable, RxJS
The list will be outdated long before I'm finished singing this
My pull requests rely on multitudinous utilities
To help me lint and test and build, a deluge of analyses
And every single day there are a hundred thousand more to learn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
[Chorus]
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
This pace is agonizing! Code from yesterday is obsolete!
The speed of innovation is enough to knock me off my feet!
It's happening too fast! I can’t keep up! I’m tired! It’s all a blur!
I am the very model of a modern web developer!
[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer!1 -
git cherry-pick -n <commit>
The "-n" is alias for "--no-commit" and it applies the content of the target commit into your working directory without making any commit. Usefull if you want to cherry-pick many commits, tweak them and make a new one or simply want to grab some functionality into your index.
What's yours well-appreciated but not-that-well-known git functionality?3 -
Sometimes while writing software / consulting I feel like house md. Not always am I right the first time, but this is often due to me looking at the wrong thing. But at the end of the day I am able to give advice that may be seen absurd but usually is correct.
(tip: it's never lupus, what is quite right because code is code)1 -
"being gifted is a curse. You are f*cling crippled, you believed you were gifted, but you have been crippled the whole time."
I never could agree more to these words (healthyGamerGg, a youtube therapist specialized in people with issues related to videogames)
If you read my last rant you may in fact know i have a lot of issues with the implications of our jobs and truth be told, it all boils down to my iq.
Or better: to the fact i have a decent skill for abstracting stuff (iq is so freaking generic)... It can be a blessing while solving issues, but it feels awful when you realize that no matter the amount of money, you will still need something else to be happy the first day of work.
Sometimes I really wonder if I am an a-hole, stupid or if i think these 2 things to deny the fact my reasoning is correct.
On a side note table top games are very easy to enjoy: as soon as I sit at the table my brain goes: "the game is gonna be very boring if you play normally, at the best you are gonna learn a new strat, at the worst you are winning and it'll be just an ego jerk off... What if you play stuff you feel like to play and enjoy the ride and the conversation without planning to win?"
Except cards against humanity and yogi. Those two must be won!
(Yogi is a game where you play cards which give you restrictions e.g: "keep an index on the tip of the nose for the rest of the game" or "place this card on your head for the rest of the game" you lose as soon as you fail any of the cards you played or if you declare you can't draw)4
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