Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.

I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.

Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.

Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.

Anyway.

Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.

This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.

Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.

It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.

It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.

I've fixed all the bugs in the issue tracker that are "fun to solve". What remains are vague reports of unexpected behavior.

Today is going to be tough 😫

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

Dear fellow project member,

I agree that most code should explain itself, but if you need to use a certain method which requires you to pass several different values of the same type and you just pass values as you like and then get, as you like to call it, 'unexpected behavior', then that is YOUR F***ING PROBLEM.

I DO know your thoughts about documenting code and I DO know you think documenting code only delays the progress, but if you for once could please CHECK THE DOCUMENTATION I WROTE, there would be no need to message me EVERY FIVE BLOODY MINUTES to complain about something that actually works when used right, just because you are too lazy to read the docs!

If you would do that next time, at least the time i spend writing documentation for our project would not be COMPLETELY WASTED! 😤

Kind Regards

Life's sometimes just amazing.. like those moments when you do "rm -rf /var" instead of "rm -rf var" and your whole system gets full of errors / unexpected behavior and random crashes.. Since I have project deadline tomorrow, really dunno should I cry or laugh right now

Ever wanted to have undefined behavior in Python? Do this in Python 2 (yes this was supposed to be a fibonacci number calculator with a limit but one of my classmates forgot the conversion just as seen below):
#Begin
def fib(n):
a,b=0,1
while a<n:
print a
a,b=b,a+b

fib(raw_input)
#End

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

Dr Lanning from I, Robot:

There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul? 

One day they'll have secrets... one day they'll have dreams. 

It's more annoying for me when my code works and I don't know why (when actually it has not work) than when my code doesn't work and I don't know why.

During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.

Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.

Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.

The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)

It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.

Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.

You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:

1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries

2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc

From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.

This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.

So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.

Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P

Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.

And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.

Have anyone experience unexpected behavior using JavaScript? So I wrote this script that manipulate the DOM... however on over clicking a button... Something breaks, however the deadline is tomorrow. Code review is successful. I am sure no sane person will click a button that many times 😅

So here is a mini rant from an amateur/hobbyist developer (me).

Over the past week, I've taken on a project that is much larger than any other projects i've attempted to handle (steam trading bot). This meant that there would be logic flaws, weird bugs due to unexpected behavior from shitty web apis (and their poor documentation hmmmm).

Anyhow, fast forward a few days and the code is complete. It's mostly functional, apart from a few glitches and unexpected behavior here and there...or so i thought. Apparently if someone trades and item to me that isnt in my pricegrid, the bot freaks out and kills itself, relaunches, and repeats this cycle (pm2). And i only found out about this on my way to school

So in desperation to fix such a critical flaw in my code (if my bot breaks a lot and doesnt accept trades, i can get banned from backpack.tf), i bust out my only device which is my phone, and start editing away (JuiceSSH and turbo client is godsend ty). 30 minutes later, after toiling through code with no indentation or syntax highlights (mobile pls), ive fixed it. So i push to live and alls well.

Then I arrive at school, pull out my laptop and decided to check up on my code to see if anything needs fixing.

Oh look in one line i used '||' instead of '&&'.

ok lets fix it.

ok lets push to live again.

I launched WinSCP to move the files onto the server, and just as the loading bar finishes and the file is overwritten, i realized; FUCK the code i had on my laptop wasnt the latest version i just worked on on my phone.

So that's that. 30 minutes of typing code without indentation and syntax highlighting on a 5 inch screen and it's all gone.

TLDR:
Version control is a must.