Here's my piece of advice for new devs out there:

1 - Pick one language to learn first and stick with it, untill you grasp some solid fundamentals. (Variables, functions, classes, namespaces, scope, at least)

2 - Pick an IDE, and stick with it for now. Don't worry about tools yet. Comment everything you're coding. The important thing is to comment why you wrote it, and not what it does. Research git and start using version control, even when coding by yourself alone.

3 - Practice, pratice and pratice. If you got stuck, try reading the language docs first and see if you can figure it out yourself. If all else fails, then go to google and stackoverflow. Avoid copying the solution, type it all and try to understand it.

4 - After you feel you need to go to the next level, research best practices first, and start to apply them to your code. Try to make it modular as it grows. Then learn about tools, preprocessors and frameworks.

5 - Always keep studying. Never give up. We all feel that we have no idea of what we are doing sometimes. That's normal. You will understand eventually. ALWAYS KEEP STUDYING.

boss: please look into tools that do X.

fullstackchris: Ah, here's a solution we can use!

boss: I don't want to use it because it is too complicated.

fullstackchris: ok, that's fine with me...

[one week later] boss: oh I found this nice site that does X, can we do X?

fullstackchris: YES, THAT'S EXACTLY THE SOLUTION I ALREADY FOUND, *AFTER* YOU ASKED ME TO LOOK FOR A SOLUTION, AND IN THE END YOU DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT. OH HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND?!?!

F*@#! *%*#

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

We can compile, transpile, and do all sorts of fucky internet things through an entire development pipeline and then troubleshoot through all sorts of hackery and dev sorcery to output html.

Or I can just index.php and be done with it.

I dunno man, I dig frontend and using the popular js libs to put shit online and be done without having to deal with the fuckery that is wasm or use something similar to Rust to bring shit to my clients.

9 times out of 10, these dudes have been well served with the php or node or even golang that i give them.

Seems that a lot of tools coming up just make shit harder.

Even VBScript seems simpler compared to the amount of web fuckery going on right now.

Yeah I keep current, but fuck, every day it seems as if shit was just getting more and more complex

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

Writing style of a sane human vs. my new boss

A sane human:
Statement 1 in simple English.

Statement 2 in simple English.
1. Point A
2. Point B
3. Point C

Statement 3 in simple English.

My new boss:
Statement 1 loaded with jargons. Statement 2 more complex, 1) point a, 2) point b, 3) point c. Statement 3 in Latin, Sanskrit, and Unicode.

Everyone his proposing him simpler approaches and tools to use and he is arguing with everyone that his methods are best without any reasonable points.

4 hours! four fucking hours! f.o.u.r. h.o.u.r.s.!
It's the amount in the time domain this bug has cost me to fix. The cost in the sanity domain is immeasurable...
I swear, the god damn ass births of devs who coded this abomination should be slowly mutilated and then raped by their own severed limbs.
It took me 4 hours to figure out that their 12 year old binary CLI tool they used to generate PDFs from PHP could not handle neither HTML5 nor some linebreaks at specific places. Some part of it is due to them using REGEX to find and replace HTML tag.
Yes, I am indeed very pissed. And I need a 🥃 or 3

What we learned:
- Don't use REGEX to "parse" HTML
- Don't call random compiled CLI tools from PHP if there are PHP packages to do the same shit

Oh, great

Hired a new BI developer. She tested reasonably ok in SQL, and certainly showed good strengths in visualising data, plus had a good attitude in the interview. We hired her. She broke her laptop the first day. We got her another then she complained the camera didn't work but didn't realise the lever in front of the camera was to move the privacy shutter off and on.

Assigned her some work of taking queries that are used in a BI tool that targets the transactional database directly, and re-jigging them for Snowflake which we're using as a data warehouse now, aggregating all our data into one place. Yet, she's struggling to understand why the SQL query she's pasted in doesn't work as-is.

I go over it again; the source schemas and tables are this, but in Snowflake we've named them this. She then bemoans how much work that is to change them all - I say use find and replace. She then struggles with Snowflake syntax errors and asks for a guide on T-SQL to Snowflake. I show her Google and say "this is what I did when I hit these problems - search for 'Snowflake equivalent to T-SQL getdate()' or 'how to get current date in Snowflake' but she still doesn't understand. I ask if she's every had to work between T-SQL and MySQL or MySQL and PostgreSQL or Oracle and so on and she says yes. I say the syntax isn't the same, is it? And she goes oh, now I understand.

She scored reasonably in her SQL test but I'm now concerned there's something fundamental missing in her grasp of SQL. I gave her a detailed demo of the tools, I explained in the interview and on her start about our move to a data warehouse for all our apps, and put her through some training plus gave her time to work through our Confluence pages - not expecting she'll remember everything, but more to ensure she recalls they exist and what the general contents are.

Anyhow, that's my rant.

I'm managed by idiots who don't fully realize the nightmare they're creating.

They're making small operational changes, but hundreds of them with zero evidence to back their claims up.

When I bring up how it actually works, and how operations actually work I'm told I don't use the tools as much as management does and that my feedback is limited to how I use the tool.

So now I'm just gambling that they won't fuck up too bad before I get that sweet sweet sellout money and just letting them fuck everything up they want without any warnings from me.

I'm quickly learning that the phrase of the year is, "Fuck em".

I love tools such as IntelliSense or Copilot, don't get me wrong!

But i still have a deep rooted fear that one day, developers will become so dependent on those luxuries, that we will become practically unable to write code on our own, without our cloud overlords blessings.

Until, you know.. the server for such a service will crash and no one will know how to fix it without its own help. *see Palpatine meme reference*

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

Years later the supposed 'cancer' that is linux: a fully featured, and more and more polished FREE operating system running Microsoft development tools, a rich GUI which does away with the crappy windows 98 taskbar, multiple virtual desktops, and steam !

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

My biggest problem with Visual Studio Code is that every fucking piece of shit dev thinks it's their duty to introduce it to me. STOP. Just stop this shit, alright? Wanna use vscode? Fine, just don't tell me it's the best tool and I MUST use it instead of the tools I'm used to. I'm tired of this bullshit.
Every new project, every new team. Starting from js/java/.net monke and ending with PMs, I must hear this bullshit about god blessed IDE that I must use, because "why you need intellij/webstorm/rider? just install vscode and some plugins. we all use it in our project and it's ok".
FUCK YOU! Refactoring is not just renaming variables and extracting blocks of code into functions. If you want terminal integrated into your text editor with highlighting and LSP support, so be it. I want an IDE with rich refactoring tools, code analysis and good completion, database viewing/modeling support, good build tools support, good UI for git and git-diff, good test and code coverage support. I don't want your semi-IDE, bloated with hundreds of bugged third-party plugins, which I must spend a week on to configure and merry with each other before using.
JUST STOP this crap and let people use the tools they are proficient/comfortable/productive with.

A member of infra team:
"Hey, we are migrating to a Microsoft office tools and we migrated your google drive data to One drive"
I go and check the new One Drive account and it's empty. So I point that out and the reply was:
"You should export your files to a zip and then import them to One Drive"
I didn't want to waste my time showing him that he is just contradicting himself in less than 5 mn and in two nearly consecutive messages.
I need more patience.

Somehow I enjoy creating flawlessly working nifty utilities a lot more than writing actual business code.

It's that versatility and reusability of a well-written utility that makes it suitable for many use-cases that puts a smile on my face.

A single-purpose business and use-case-specific piece of code doesn't do it for me anymore. I guess it never did, really...

I wish I could get paid for building tools rather than business apps :)

Hello there. I'm a junior frontend developer, and I'm starting to think that IT is not for me.

Okay, first things first. This story/rant might be a bit longer than I previously thought, but whatever... :p

I started working in frontend about a year ago.

Now the problem is, that I'm absolutely rubbish with coding, and I'm starting to think that it might have something to do with my personality. While I loved (and still do) doing HTML and CSS, and maybe some JS as well, when it comes to working with frameworks, build tools, TypeScript, and all this *****, I just want to stand up and carefully smash the keyboard through the display. I can't stand the constant cryptic error messages and gazillions of config files, and don't even get me started with TypeScript. This is not how I imagined what programming is like - I know it's my fault, I was a bit naive. I still love making simpler things in HTML/CSS/JS and playing around with Linux, but I lost my will to do any of these even in my spare time. I don't have the patience to feel incompetent all the time with the promise that in a few years, doing this rubbish 8 hours a day, I will get better at it. Some colleagues even talked about it being like Lego and getting into the "flow": yeah... not in my case. There's nothing creative in this, it all feels like a factory line where I have to do the line work but also configure the machines as well...

The funny thing is, I made about the same amount of money working in less prestigious jobs. Sure I didn't like any of them, they were tiring and boring as hell, but at least they were not stressful and frustrating. I'm seriously considering moving to Western Europe and working as a bicycle delivery guy in the Alps, a postman, a waiter, or literally anything else that has something to do with the real world, and leave programming to the actual software engineers (who I deeply respect by the way).

I'll probably add more to this, but I need to go now and meditate a bit. :D

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

Vendor lock-in for cloud providers is really small, and you don't notice it until you need it. Route53 has an "import zone file" button, but they don't have an "export zone file" button. Yes, there are other tools and scripts to do it, but bit-by-bit AWS, GCP, and Azure make it difficult to leave.

Aaagh...... 2022 this year has been shity for real..
So its now 1 year and I've been a fullstack developer for this mid tech company as the only developer

so I've been trying to get these guys to hire a second developer. and try to also upgrade equipment and these guys didnt even bother to attend to my requests and during my evaluation meeting on friday these guys where down my neck about why projects are taking time to complete i MEAN WTF!!!!! told them its bcoz Im a 1 man army and most of the times Im chocked with the "any other duty" thing and how tha fuck do they expect them projects to be done on time
I'm the only developer some times i get sick 2weeks and where i left off is were i continue from and thats 2 weeks work of progress down the drain
I'm so fucking pieced off ryt now I feel like droping this shity job and find a much better organization
they want me to build them a developer department and they dont even equip me with the necessary tools to do so WTF do they think they are doing they think they know better than me?
so let them build their fucking dev department without me
this has been a fucking stressful experiance
wrote them a later to hire a second developer
I dont fucking care how they are going to do it
contracting or an internal dev if they dont in the next 3 months I fucking leaving this shit

We've been using JIRA for over half a year now, and my colleagues still can't use it properly.

I've never had the problem, but to some amazing technological feat, every time they create a ticket, it "disappears", so they make a NEW ticket with just the title references to the actual one.

Love my daily review of JIRA, it's like a fucking raiders of the lost ark scene.

"ooooo what does this one mean, perhaps there is a clue if i shine a light on it just right"

jesus christ incompetence is rampant

How come Rust is the most loved programming language? I wanted to give rust a try in my windows machine and when I run `cargo run` or `cargo build` is shows: linker `link.exe` not found
Okay, how to fix it?
you need to download 8GB+ of bullshitty visual studio C++ build tools just to run a simple rust programs! WTF!

Previously when I installed rust, it didn't need all these bullcrap. why now?

Is the CS field creating terms for the sake of creating terms?

Someone mentioned a "closure" in another post. I instinctively knew what they meant by that based upon the code I saw. I had heard the term thrown around before, but it had not yet connected in my mind. I wondered why I had not been exposed enough to care.

So I thought: What does C++ have as far as closures?

I found that C++ has lambdas. Those are definitions for function objects. They do not exist at runtime. But a closure does. The analog is you have classes. They are definitions and do not exist at runtime. But instances of classes do. So at runtime the instance is what you are working with. This is the same as lambdas vs closures in C++. The closure is the runtime counterpart. Why a separate term for what essentially is an instance? Is it because it captures data and code? As far as I know the closure is all data that gets passed around that calls a function. So it is essentially an instance of a lambda.

Another term: memoization. I have yet to see this added to any dictionary in online tools like a browser. Is the term so specific that nobody cares to add it? I mean these are tools programmers use all the time.

My guess is these terms originated a long time ago and I have just not been exposed to the contexts for these terms enough. It just seems like I feel like I have been in the field a long time. But a lot of terms seem alien to me. I also have never seen these terms used at work. Many of the devs I work with actively avoid CS specific terms to not confuse our electrical coworkers. My background started in electrical. So maybe I just didn't do enough CS in college.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Definitely Git, Node, Composer and PHP at the moment.
It's fucking incredible how you have such tools for free.
The younger generations have it much easier to get into programming.

Like many others: Linux, GNOME, the GNU build tools, Firefox, blender, ...

A few I haven't seen mentioned:
- Liferea
- Kdenlive
- restic/borg backup

I'm sick of a toxic soup of ways to test frontend.

Throw in vitest, jest,jsdom, testing library, @testing-library/jest-dom, together and you are left with n^2 ways things can be configured.

Why on earth do I need to import anything to do with Jest when I am working with a vitest project.

I think such tools are made to get invite opportunities to speak at conferences.

Why are we even using JIRA?

It's clear from the behavior of the rest of my team that nobody ever has it open, looks at it, or thinks about any tasks that would improve the product other than sputtering out the occasional "mArKeTiNg HyPe" with incomplete horrible tickets that are at best barely decipherable.

Honestly, we can save the $50 a month and I'll just use my own personal trello board, the outcome would be the same.

I mean my life is a joke: we had to have a near hour-long google hangouts for literally dragging and dropping the 'demo/review' tickets to 'done' because my colleagues are so incompetent they can't read the tickets and realize which tickets HAVE LITERALLY ALREADY BEEN SHIPPED TO PRODUCTION WEEKS AGO.

48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.

And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.

The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected

What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.

Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.

Just started Online Banking at my bank. Checked how much money I have and what I can do on the website.

Afterwards I opened the dev tools and see that there is a js warning. So I open the console and the fucking first thing I see is: Loglevel set to INFO. WHAT THE FUCK?!?

Other things I found out:
API Endpoints are logged here. Two deprecation warnings for a function used. A warning about a deprecated service used.

The log level is now set to WARN. Several more deprecation warnings for the framework from before.

The fuck is this?

I wouldn't have a problem with opinionated tools
Unfortunately, their opinions tend to be retarded

For a long time I could not understand how do people put up with watching ads in Android apps. Then it dawned upon me: they grew up like this and they never had a proper classic old-school desktop experience. Back in the day it was unimaginable to have intrusive ads. I will never put up with intrusive ads. I despise it

Now even developer tools have ads, like Docker or NPM

!rant

The new end to the idiotic code snippet head scratchers interviews (awkward for both parties but nobody is willing to admit it)?

Hometasks.

Infinite internet access, use whatever tools you want, do as much as you can in 2-3 hours.

The best non-toxic way to see how someone works as a dev.

This is the way I expect you to work, so this is the way I will interview you.

Sorry silicon valley, we don't need people who can write up a binary search algo from rote memory.

part of my workflow i want to improve?

in general, take more time to get to know better the technologies and tools i'm working with.
e.g. learn all the fancy hacks and features of my IDE or of a certain language or framework.

i tend to be in the mode "i don't have time for that, it already works the way i use it". if i spend "too much" time on learning stuff, i feel bad, since i could also spend that time working on my ever growing list of tasks. but i think, that's not a good habit...

Quick questions for some vim lovers out there.

I've seen a lot of youtube videos of people using vim/nvim/spacevim/... as their main IDE, claiming that they are perfectly fine with this setup. However, most of this people are programming in not heavy object oriented languages, like JS, C, Rust, Go.

My question is: are there any Java developers who are using vim as IDE and are satisfied with their setup? Is is even possible to migrate from Jetbrains tools to your setup without huge productivity drop? By productivity I mean - a lot of IDE stuff like name refactor, great lombok support, debugging tools

When you have a poorly designed dating site, what should you do, make it better, or make it worse..

Why, worse of course !

Just like Badoo did when they took away all those search options that would let you narrow your search down to a single person..

Last time did that, after a few years of chatting, they even wanted me to move in with them ! ( I didn't as they wasn't suitable enough, but they was the most suitable on the site at the time ! )

Now I have to wade through half a million members, one at a time..

A bit like Ebay..

Or reading YouTube comments..

Start coding tools that make our lives easier, not harder !!!

Software is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not pass the buck to the human !

Best
typescript - I needed to learn it for a project and I like it, I know java and javascript and it is something in between of those two that makes writing enterprise web applications easier, it’s nice that you can debug it directly in chrome, it makes things easier

Worst
docker, Dockerfiles - devops tools - amount of shell commands inside them and mangled && to make everything running in one file layer makes those unreadable mess that you need to think twice to understand, there is no debugger for it, you do everything with try and see what happens, there is actually no real dev toolset for devops and that sucks, since you got builder images that makes things more mangled than before, it’s clearly missing some external officially approved scripting language or at least
FUNCTION and
WITH LAYER and indentation / parentheses syntax and they still trying to make it flat, why are you doing that ?
as a result next to Dockerfile cause you can’t import multiple ones you get bunch bash scripts with mangled syntax and other crap that is glued together to make a monster - and this runs most of current software on this planet

I'm learning Rust as a case study for my own programming language. It's funny how many approaches exist to the humble loop.

- In classic procedural languages, a loop's job is to repeat actions, and as such it provides a multitude of tools to control this repetition.

- In all languages with iterators, a for-in loop is a construct that does something with every element of a collection. In languages with both iterators and generator functions, this can even be used to define a sequence in terms of another.

- In Rust, a loop is an expression that obtains its value through repeated execution. It can also be used like a classic loop, of course, but this is the interesting part.

- My little language is a functional language, so "loop" is the Y combinator. To loop means to define the value of an expression in terms of itself. It's the only looping construct, gets special treatment from the type checker and it's also used in recursive type definitions.

Oh my.. I think I'm enjoying molesting kubernetes :)

A while ago I got pissed at k8s because with 1.24 they brought backward-incompatible changes, ruling my cluster broken. Then I thought to myself: "why not create a Docker image that would run kubernetes inside? Separate images for control plane, agent and client"

Took me a while, but I think tonight I've had a breakthrough (I love how linux works...)!! The control-plane is spinning up!! Running on containerd

Still needs some work and polishing, but hey! Ephemeral k8s installation with a single docker-run command sure sounds tempting!

P.S. Yes, I know there is `kind` and 'kinder', but I'm reluctant to install a separate tool that installs a set of tools for me. Kind of... too shady. Too many moving parts. Too deeply hidden parts I may have to fix. Having a dumb-simple Dockerfile gives me the openness, flexibility and simplicity I want. + I can always use it as a base image to add my customizations later on! Reinstalling a cluster would be a breeeeeeze

I’m not sure why my dev tools feels the need to change warnings to a foreign language, but thanks Chrome!

A VR/AR OS, with gesture recognition and virtual tools, to substitute workstations.

Imagine painting a picture in a AR canvas, for example.

Or using photoshop in VR for a distraction free enviroment. For coding, I would want to use a real keyboard, of course, but I would use virtual screens for everything.

The possibilities are endless, but people would probably use it mostly for porn, obviously.

That moment when windows tools can't delete a file and only WSL can.
At this point it's just entertaining for for to see in how many ways windows can break.

I’m sooo excited when any new frontend JS framework is available. Angular, React, more recently Vue, Svelte. Bring ‘em on. I wanna try them all.

Just kidding…
As long as the tools at hand allow me to get the job done, keep clients and end users happy, I don’t give a fuck.
This meme is actually the epitome of what I hate with a lot of web developers I’ve encountered

What's with so many developers using shitty hardware? It's literary the one tool you need for your profession, there should be absolutely no objection to having the best one available. Stop bitching about some software using 50% of your CPU when you're on the bare entry-level HW ffs! And don't give me that "can't afford it" bullshit. If you take your car to the repair shop, you're also paying for the tools needed for the job; the same way, your customers need to pay for the tools you need as a developer. If you can't afford that, there's clearly not enough demand for the work you do, so go find a different job.

Hey :)

what tools do you use to design your software architecture?

at the moment I am confronted with a mix of word, one note, draw.io, visio and balsamiq.

I have the feeling that this is a bit off because it's too many tools so I just wanted to ask.

Looking at vacancies and the JS build tools asked (Babel, Gulp) and then visiting their websites I notice that I don't understand what they are going on about.

"Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines."

What the actual corpo fuck?

The "get started" page expects you already know npm, typescript, and when you look at their pages, well... Where does the circlejerk end and the actual Javascript start?

I've been out of the corporate loop for a few years, seems it's all about build tools these days. I need to get out of this industry pronto.

There's a simple issue with this opensource browser extension.. actually I think I can fix that real quick and submit a pu OH WAIT!!!
I booted to Windows partition and don't have any fucking dev tools/console/package manager to install what I need!

So I got a new project idea , an app that takes your image and fits it in a mac window like a border .
Basically when I make a new website or app and I want to post screenshots of it , just the plain screenshot of the app looks bland but if I have a nice aesthetic ✨ mac OS window around it with rounder corners and stuff , it would look very cool . I bet everybody here has seen something like this once or twice. Is there an app that does this already ? takes an image from the user and puts a window around it , with the minimize ,maximize and close buttons and let's the user download the final image . Not necessarily a mac window with there could be option for different types of windows . Even VS code repo on Github has a mac window around it lol . So I would like to make an app that makes this whole process easier instead of requiring you to edit images of your app (in case u don't have windows or a mac for screenshot)
What tools (tech stack )would I require to make a web app for this purpose ?

Now I have to make updates in three different tools about the projects I’m working on, this is stupid since we work for a tech company and we shouldn’t be using fucking Power Point to update statuses on projects. Management should be making other’s life easier not harder. 🥸

What are some of you favorite tools from your toolset? be it software, hardware, some plugin or even some hack you use often

I used to hate email and to consider it a chore but after adopting "inbox zero", switching from web based shit to a proper client and automating the management of the many automatic notifications I get everyday I'm starting to think which when well managed email is still one of the best asynchronous communication tools, far better than sluggish and distracting chats like Teams or Slack which have their place but I think which currently they're pretty overrated.

Started new contract recently, their main product is aiming to be some kind of automation holy grail for business, basically low code nonsense integrating with most of the industry standard tools like sap or confluence. Their entire infrastructure is setup manually, slowly transitioning from on premise to AWS. No infra as code, no playbooks, not even scripts, just "engineers" painstakingly clicking the UI. They don't seem to see the irony of being automation company that doesn't use automation, but I'm having a good laugh at least.

New office stories.

They use following channels as official communication channels

1. Google Hangouts (yes, living in 1800s)

2. WhatsApp groups (FUCK MY LIFE) Thankfully I am not part of any and will avoid actively.

3. Slack (heaven's sake some sense here).

And above that, they use Google Workplace for emails and office tools.

And now combine this mess with Apple. How inhumane my working conditions are.

Triaging this project that's running on IIS makes me feel like my skillset is wasted on such banal garbage - while at the same time hoping nobody realizes what a mistake it was to put me on it because I have no idea how to troubleshoot or fix it.

I try not to be that guy who blames every issue on their tools but I can't believe some of these issues and respective fixes. Our QA was down for 2 months because I hadn't uninstalled a default module which prevents POST requests.

More fzf: deeper integration with other dev tools I use.

Really the tools are simple as

Isn’t it delightful when you come in to a large project to discover that they have a large underlying core that no one wants to touch but everyone relies on.

Quickly perusing the code you realize that the base was clearly created by someone who found their first tutorials for Java, but were previously a c developer.

It’s funny cause this code is of course from ~20 years ago and in different sections you can tell they were a C developer, a business admin, a Db admin, a junior conforming to pressures from others.

I recently looked at the deep rooted abuses of Java beans, and this entire internally created state management engine that serves no purpose but to create contrived complexity.

The use of propriety tools, that they paid lots for that perform incredibly simple tasks that have long since been solved by the open source community. Many of which are long defunct.

And the constant focus is on monkey patching the engine to solve small issues, which bloat the time to deal with issues. Since everything needs to be tested by their methodologies.

The inability to understand that the underlying structure is the issue and that tackling that, rather than just shifting the entire solution to new languages will suddenly solve the problems(or other underlying systems).

It’s just sad.

Unity Engine lures you into trying it out with its simple starting Tools.
But once you realize this is just a fassade - it's too late and the trap got you.

You're now in limbo of to simple code which isn't compatible with the more complicated features!

Oh you try to fix this bug here? Let me suggest you 6 year old solutions from Unity Version that are not supported anymore!

Sorry just have to say it: Unity is big pile of sh*t! I don't know who had the idea of making this frankenstein-monster!

Just to consider thinking not only making one monster - NO!

Lets do a whole bunch of iterations and versions of this monster and yes you guessed it: they are not compatible to each other!

So....
Another machine not working till morning.
That's what happens when the engineer knows a bit how to operate the machines but doesn't have a grasp on how cutting tools work...
Replacing 60€ tools every 4 hours that should last a week is not profitable.
When so many tools are spent that there's no more in stock.
Also manufactor has cutting parameters for a reason... Making the tools work 3 times faster or deeper does not mean profit, means damaged machines and tools.
As comparison, think over clocking a cpu to 7000hz and pushing it to the max 24h a day...

Someone in my mind, I see programmers who use Windows as “unserious” and “don’t really know what they’re doing”. I always catch myself every time because I know that this is entirely false. And smart people actually use the tools they’re most comfortable in to get the job done. At the end of the day, what really matters is how much money you’re making for the capitalists at the top.

Please don't use OS specific libraries/binaries/build tools...etc

I'm talking to C/C++ users here. once in a while I see something on github maybe im just curios maybe I find your niche code useful but then you use make (who the hell still uses make?) or your library depends on another library than can only be mindlessly installed in a unix environment. and the most obscene of all a solution file...

thank god for rust.

!rant
I'll be the first to admit that my web dev skills are average. Where I work we don't get pushed much since we work off of a very limited (custom to us) platform, which doesn't leave one very well rounded. I am very good with CSS/HTML/FLEXBOX/RESPONSIVE DESIGN and have minimal skills in PHP and JAVASCRIPT. In school I've dabbled with SQL, but hell if I remember much (beside key, the whole key and nothing but the key). What other languages or codes do you recommend learning; what's hot right now? Or should I focus on putting higher emphasis on the ones mentioned above first? I am a front end developer and don't plan on ever doing back end so not looking for the toughest of the tough - just something that will help me grow and land a better job. If there's any cool learning sites you know of too, or other tools, please let me know.

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

So... I've been looking for a week on why my machine was braking tools on every piece...
Found out yesterday, it was machining without water....
Told the engenheir (my direct boss)... Started working at midnight and was the same...
Decided to fix it, besides the fact that I'm a temp and shouldn't be doing his job...
Can't fix it... To many broken pieces....
Well a few metal pipes like straws and some rubber bands and its fixed for now...
I really can't understand why a engenheir gets 10x more money and can't bother to fix the machines....
Well I know why... He's not the one paying for new ones when these brake.
Next: other machine Is working without oil...
And no, I'm not messing with that... In a few months they will just have to buy a new one.

Ok, we were troubleshooting a network connection problem. My boss told me: use fping, a small command line utility that gives you a timestamped ping. We can then check when did the connection go down. Ok. Since I've always advocated the importance of knowing advanced scripting tools, i tried to do it with powershell. I've been playing with Test-Connection for an hour to try to get not only the timestamp when the connection is ok, but the timestamp when the connection is down. Don't want to go into details. I've just a question. A solution that allows you to do such an easy task in say 20 lines of code is the proof that the system works or that it doesn't work? To make long story short, now i'm downloading fiping.

Can someone, with senior experience in the whole software development process at a large scale company, come talk some sense into our development managers on how you properly run a development company??

The way we do things is wrong in so many ways, but I can't get trough to them, maybe someone with more authority will.

Like im talking about things like, no version control, being totally blindsighted to technical debt, no code review, telling me we shouldnt use 3rd party tools to track issues, tasks, etc.

Are there like intervention companies for this?

What do you use for automating infrastructure? I'm thinking tools like Ansible, Terraform and Chef

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

I am SO TIRED of marketing teams imposing their tools to developers. I am TIRED of all those crappy old libraries or meaningless APIs

favourite/recommended database IDEs/tools? I'm looking to put more time into a hobby project using mysqlite. I only got datagrip, mysql workbench and DB Browser for SQLite on my list so far

I implore ANYONE... please...

Have you EVER written a SINGLE Jest test that didn't have some sort of bullshit spewing stuff like this:

"ReferenceError: You are trying to `import` a file after the Jest environment has been torn down."

"Warning: React.createElement: type is invalid -- expected a string (for built-in components) or a class/function (for composite components) but got: object. You likely forgot to export your component from the file it's defined in, or you might have mixed up default and named imports."

and yet running on a device, features work flawlessly and quite well, no errors or even warnings in sight logged

This is the most fragile pile of garbage I have ever seen.

I hate this.

inb4 your stupid ass todo boilerplate garbage you wrote tests for in freshman year. i'm talking about a REAL app with HUNDREDS of components.

where the grownup testing tools at? it's a question I've still not answered after a year of fucking around with this framework

Terraform + helm-chart ... I really ned a break. Who the fuck invented this shit.
The HCL format sucks
The documentation sucks
The dev tools suck
The debug output sucks

But I'm ok with that, I can manage.
But today really it shot the bird ... I can't have a fucking comma in a string? Because idk why the fuck helm-release tries to parse that fucking string and wants to make an array or whatever out of it? Why, you fucking abomination?
Something in the docs? Nah, who reads them anyway.
Because you know it's totally not strange that a string is analyse and oh wait there's a comma in it, the dev surely wants me to make an array out of it, because you know ...
So now I have to escape my fucking comma to prevent it to parse my fucking string. I just want to have a fucking string you hideous monstrosity ....

Fuck Android development tools! What the fucking hell man?! I can't setup and run a simple hello world app!! And that's not the first time. I have tried this on multiple occasions throughout the years and always failed. Non-matching? multiple versions of build-tools, platforms, platform-tools, cmdline-tools, system-images, ... and binaries moving from folder to another between updates and Java, oh don't get me started on Java. I'm too old for this stuff.

Is making an HTML signature part of a backend developer's Job?

Don't mind setting them up on the clie t's server but, ffs sake, I don't give a sh*t how they look.

This feels like a huge waste of time since the designers have the fucking tools to do it

The tools that are improving the DX a lot like Vercel, Netlify, Nextjs, etc

What's the worst part about testing React components? Using the equivalent of fucking stone tools to do your component integration tests! We got errors with no context and errors with no stack trace, just spewing out bullshit! A sample:

The classic "Can't access .root on unmounted test renderer"

The unforgettable and ALWAYS visible "Warning: An update to YourShittyComponent inside a test was not wrapped in act(...)."

We do love it!

Do you use some-code tools for frontend development?

Can anyone recommend any good code/screen sharing tools?

My use case is that I have a Windows work laptop with a garbage keyboard and I want to share my editor with my personal MacBook without having to clone the repo there or actually share any files.

I tried Live Share on VS Code but the shared terminal barely ever works, and you can't stage files from the editor GUI. I imagine something like TeamViewer would be very slow for this?
I'm not sure if there's any tool that covers this use case or if I should just stick with Live Share and try to workaround its issues. :/

Need advice about switching to contracting.

TL;DR;

So I had 2 years of exp as an android dev, then I had a 1.5 year gap from doing android and now for the past 6 months Ive been doing android again fulltime. Im thinking of switching to contracting due to my debts and boring project and life crushing slow corporate processes in my current fulltime job, so I need tips and advices as to where should I start looking for new contracting gigs and in general what should I pay attention to. If it helps, I am based in EU, but am open to any EU/US gigs.

Now the full story:

Initially when I joined my current fulltime job after a break I had zero confidence, lowered my and employers expectations, joined as a junior but quickly picked up the latest standards and crushed it. Im doing better than half devs in my scrum team right now and would consider myself to be a mid level right now.

Asked for a 50% bump, manager kinda okayed it but the HQ overseas is taking a very long time to give me the actual bump. I have been waiting for 10 weeks already (lots of people in the decision chain were on and off vacations due to summer, also I guess manager sent this request to HQ too late, go figure). Anyways its becoming unnaceptable and I feel like its time for a change.

Now since I have mortgage and bills to pay, even with the bump that I requested that would leave me with like maximum 700-800 bucks a month after all expenses. I have debts of around 20k and paying them back at this rate would take 3 years at least and sounds like a not viable plan at all.

Also it does not help that the project Im working on is full of legacy and Im not learning anything new here. Corporate life seems to be very slow, lots of red tape kills creativity and so on. I remember in startups I was cooking features left and right each sprint, in here deploying a simple popup feature sometimes takes weeks due to incompetence in the chain. I miss the times where I worked in startups, did my job learned nre skills and after 6 months could jump on another exciting gig. Im not growing here anymore.

So because my ADD brain seems to be suited much better for working in startups, and also I need to make more money quick and I dont see a future in current company, I am thinking of going back to contracting. All I need right now is to build a few side apps, get them reviewed by seniors and fill my knowledge gaps. Then I plan of starting interviewing as a mid level or even a senior for that matter, since I worked with actual seniors and to be honest I dont think getting up to their level would be rocket science.

Only difference between mid and senior devs that I see atleast in my current company is that seniors are taking on responsibility more often, and they also take care of our tools, such as CD/CI, pipeline scripts, linters and etc. Usually seniors are the ones who do the research/investigations and then come up with actual tasks/stories for mids/juniors. Also seniors introduce new dependencies and update our stack, solve some performance issues and address bottlenecks and technical debt. I dont think its rocket science, also Ive been the sole dev responsible for apps in the past and always did decent work. Turns out all I needed was to test myself in an environment full of other devs, thats it. My only bottleneck was the imposter syndrome because I was a self taught dev who worked most of my career alone.

Anyways I posted here asking for some tips and advices on how to begin my search for new contract opportunities. I am living in EU, can you give me some decent sites where I could just start applying? Also I would appreciate any other tips opinions and feedback. Thanks!

Let's exclude some files from our coverlet coverage test!

Sure! That's easy, just remember to pass this super short, understandable, and rememberable command-line argument:

-- DataCollectionRunSettings.DataCollectors.DataCollector.Configuration.ExcludeByFile="**/myFile.cs/**"

You're fucking kidding me, right?

It's 2022 and tools are still using PowerShell syntax... just kill me

Best tools for QA that you use for web and app development? 👊🏻😉

Anyone knows any deepfake tools where I can replace face of the model in porn with my crush's face?

Why the fuck do I have to train ppl on a CRM platform when they have multiple tutorials and I am a backend dev.

Not a fucking CRM dev.

I dont give a shit how the client wants to do business. I just build their tools.