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Search - "warnings from hell"
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I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
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.4 -
Fucking apple & Mac OS..
So.. Before high sierra, you could create a USB using boot camp.
All good & dandy without too much fuss.
No longer. instead it automatically mounts & copies the os onto a apfs partition(?) and without as much as a mention or warning it just reboots immediately when it's done.
Srsly, not even a silly "hey, we need to reboot"..
Now, I could probably have gone to diskutil, formatted, set the boot flags and copied the files..
But rly, Nvm that.
Besides I might actually find some use in a windows install.
So needing to install windows to create an USB is acceptable.
But Bloody hell, it's been a while since I've been in this triggered from something..
T_T no warnings, just force reboot into windows. -
I just got a phone call from "Microsoft" because there are Trojans on my pc. The broken English (and the content of the call) told me that it was scam, but I wanted to have my fun, so I continued the call.
After I told them that I am on my Computer, I was forwarded to an "expert", and now the funny part starts 😁
Scammer: you have your keyboard in front of you??
Me: yes
S: you see the strg, control ctrl button on the bottom left
M: yes *rly?*
S: what button. Is next to it?
M: fn
S: ...
M: ... *XD*
S: and next to it?
M: that's the windows button
S: ok, press that button along with 'r'
M: ok
S: what do you see?
M: *telling him what I see on my GERMAN pc*
S: ok, type 'eventvwr' *spelling it like hell*
I did so. Just while this spelling I could have hit my head on the desk... It was hilarious
He navigates me to the error and warnings and tells me that those are Trojans 😂 and that this is the reason some programs (especially my antivirus software) aren't running properly.
Well I told him that those aren't Trojans and that all my programs are running properly. I don't know if that was the reason, he stopped the call, but I wasn't able to connect to their 'headserver'.
In the end I am sad that I wasn't able to f*ck him up more. Maybe I would have been able to get some more information about their company to kick their *****.
Next time I will be (more) prepared7 -
NPM and the whole dependency tree for JS packages should burn in the pits of hell.
Let's pretend that uninstalling a single (albeit larger) module didn't take 8 minutes and that it didn't spit out 20 warnings from a total of 277 (HOLY FUCK) related packages.
How can you guys (JS-only devs) handle this ?!15 -
"Reflective" programming...
In almost every other language:
1. obj.GetType().GetProperties()
or
for k, v in pairs(obj) do something end
or
fieldnames(typeof(obj))
or
Object.entries(obj)
2. Enjoy.
In C++: 💀
1. Use the extern keyword to trick compilers into believing some fake objects of your chosen type actually exist.
2. Use the famous C++ type loophole or structured binding to extract fields from your fake objects.
3. Figure out a way to suppress those annoying compiler warnings that were generated because of your how much of a bad practice your code is.
4. Extract type and field names from strings generated by compiler magic (__PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __FUNCSIG__) or from the extremely new feature std::source_location (people hate you because their Windows XP compilers can't handle your code)
5. Realize your code still does not work for classes that have private or protected fields.
6. Decide it's time to become a language lawyer and make OOPers angry by breaking encapsulation and stealing private fields from their classes using explicit template instantiation
7. Realize your code will never work outside of MSVC, GCC or CLANG and will always be reliant on undefined behaviors.
8. Live forever in doubt and fear that new changes to the compiler magic you abused will one day break your code.
9. SUFFER IN HELL as you start getting 5000 lines worth of template errors after switching to a new compiler.13 -
Started a new role as a front end developer working with React, happy that i finaly won't have to work with wordpress anymore, having a great hope that I will learn from the best with my team, and then ... COVID-19 ... I have to work from home
first task, implement a feature on a react front end build with react boilerplate, first time seeing this repo and dispair quickly took over, there is no documentation except for clone and install, the code is a mess, the console is filled with errors and warnings ...
I did what I could, but it was not enought, my n+1 didn't complain but if I was him i'd fire my ass with no regret, now I understood why almost all my collegues are working as a backend devs.
I don't fear being fired, I fear the feeling of being not good, feeling useless, each morning I stare at the code and I become illiterate, I can't even touch a keyboard, now I don't know what to do, fixing this shitty app, trying to build something with react boilerplate and try to understand how the data flow, or continue my endless tutorial hell .1